"Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder"? Aspects of beauty and attractiveness.

The neural correlates of beauty comparison.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. How attractive someone is perceived to be depends on the individual or cultural standards to which this person is compared. But although comparisons play a central role in the way people judge the appearance of others, the brain processes underlying attractiveness comparisons remain unknown. In the present experiment, we tested the hypothesis that attractiv...

Book Review Facial Attractiveness: Evolutionary, Cognitive, and Social Perspectives

Edited volumes are an imperfect format for the presentation of ideas, not least because their goals vary. Sometimes they aim simply to survey the field, at other times to synthesize and advance the field. I prefer the former for disciplines that by their nature are not disposed to achieve definitive statements (philosophy, for example). A volume on an empirical topic, however, by my judgment fa...

The Politics of Dangerousness

Notions of 'dangerousness' are closely related to particular value systems, as well as philosophical, moral and ideological perspectives. Clearly the major values and sociopolitical process in a society will tend to determine what will be perceived, defined, and officially labeled as dangerous, and how conditions and behaviors so labeled will be handled. However, the term 'dangerousness' is rat...

Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder

Private and Shared Taste in Art and Face Appreciation

Whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder or shared among individuals is a longstanding question in empirical aesthetics. By decomposing the variance structure of data for facial attractiveness, it has been previously shown that beauty evaluations comprise a similar amount of private and shared taste (Hönekopp, 2006). Employing the same methods, we found that, for abstract artworks, componen...