Beauty in the Brain of the Beholder

male faces do not suggest that the bearer will place Bethesda, Maryland 20892 considerable investment in parental input. Indeed, men with symmetrical faces are less likely to accept fidelity and will invest less time with offspring. When consider-Facial beauty is an honest signal of the genotypic and ing paternity, men with facial characteristics that signal phenotypic quality of the bearer. Beautiful people are a limited opportunity to attract multiple mates would be thus regarded as high-value mates who maximize reconsidered to contribute more to reproductive success productive success by producing viable offspring. than those advertising an ability to attract more than Here, the functional neuroanatomy of facial beauty is one partner (Penton-Voak et al., 1999). Interestingly, reviewed and placed into the context of the distributed men with neonatal facial characteristics, which advertise model for human face perception. A proposed exten-a limited opportunity to attract potential partners, tend sion of the distributed model is provided, which takes to have positive personality traits attributed to them by into account the neuroanatomy of beautiful face per-female observers that may correlate with subsequent ception. behavior. However, these personality traits are not indicative of actual behavior and may be fallible. To this Background end, female observers may consider male faces to be Evolutionary theory suggests that facial beauty signals attractive if their same-sex peers consider them to be the optimum reproductive status of the bearer; it thus attractive as well. Thus, by copying the mate choice of dictates that we are drawn to those who are attractive in same-sex peers, female observers act to increase the order to maximize our success in reproducing offspring reliability of any assessments of facial attractiveness with a strong chance of survival (references in Symons, (references in Thornhill and Gangestad, 1999). 1979). Take, for example, the effect of estrogen on fe-Clearly, the ethology of beautiful face perception is male faces; estrogen markers, such as fat deposits in complex, and considering the importance of selecting the upper cheek and lip area, signal fertility and readi-high-value mates, the distinction needs to be made be-ness for reproductive effort (Perrett et al., 1998). While tween beautiful faces that are rewarding in the sense these markers are considered attractive by male observ-that they have an adaptive value (i.e., attractive different-ers, the estrogen to testosterone ratio fluctuates with sex faces) and those that are merely aesthetic (i.e., at-age such that female faces " masculinize " as …