Essay On Symmetry In The Eyes Of The Beholder

People have contributed to the physical and cultural view of beauty in societies all around the world. Each country has different beauty standards that reflect off of each other to display diversity: “Beauty is informed by values, culture, religion, background and societal influence. Concepts of beauty has change over time depending on environment, culture, etc”. Through the different standards of other cultures, societies are able to learn that there is not only one form of beauty. The evolution of beauty around the world allows people to compare opinions with another to form individual perspectives of beauty.

In people’s perspective, attractiveness possess a wide variety of positive personal qualities compared to unattractive people. Result from the study on physical attractiveness stereotypes show the attractive people had the most positive ratings. For example, they are judged as less disturbed, rated as happier and more successful, and more likely to be hired after a job interview. Thus, the concept of attractiveness having a correlation between an individual’s physical appearance and his/her achievements, abilities, psychological well-being and/or other status characteristics to create a perception is

In another study, Langlois and Roggaman (1990) took photos of faces and morphed them together to produce composite images made up of 4, 8, 16 or 32 images. Participants rated faces as increasingly attractive the more faces that went into each image; this applied to both male and female faces. The more faces in an image, the more symmetrical they become, it seems that moving a facial image closer to the average increases its perceived attractiveness. It is likely that symmetry equates to fitness and “good genes”, these people are less likely to have been affected by harmful mutation. People with attractive faces are preferred because of the benefits of passing on these attractive characteristics to offspring. Little & Hancock propose that humans have evolved to be attracted to symmetrical faces because they indicate “averageness”, which equates to genetic health. Grammar and Thornhill (1994) found that females are attracted to males with masculine characteristics, for example: large jaw and prominent cheekbones. These features arise as a result of testosterone, which is also a handicap because it suppresses the immune system. Therefore, showing only “healthy” individuals can afford to produce these traits- advertising a strong immune system. Cartwright (2000) supported this, finding men prefer photographs of women with symmetrical faces and vice versa.

Within racialized forms of ‘looking’, profound differences of history, culture and experience have often been reduced to a handful of stereotypical features, which are ‘read’ as if they represent a truth of nature, somehow indelibly inscribed on the body. (Hall, et al., 2001, p.4).

There is a phrase,” Don’t judge a book by its cover”, that has been taught over and over. It conveys that individuals should not pass judgment on others based on their looks but rather to look past their external appearance. The sad truth is that everyone does judge books by their covers; it is the first thing a person does. To put it another way, appearances influence how one is perceived and there are countless ways to prove this. One example would be in the book Lord of The Flies by William Golding. The author uses Piggy’s character and symbolism to demonstrate how his appearance impacts how his intelligence is perceived.

This article argues that physical appearance matters. In this society, children are being told lies and adults have trouble explain away the importance of physical appearance. This article gives an example of how a poor physical feature affected Robert Hoge’s life since birth. This article was written as an open discussion post. I will be using this source as an example of how physical attractiveness can affect one’s life.

I served the Davis and Sacramento communities as a member of the largest non-profit service club organization in the world, Lions Club International, through participation and planning of over 30 service events and projects targeted towards increasing community health and education, reducing hunger and poverty, and improving the environment. I was one of the first members of the club and helped grow membership by 500%. I was elected Treasurer in my second year of membership. As treasurer I produced budgets, managed club finances and maintained detailed inventory reports. I also acted as committee head for 4 service events where I lead a group of members to plan and run the

As journalist Kate Fox stated, “Every period of history has had its own standards of what is and is not beautiful, and every contemporary society has its own distinctive concept of the ideal physical attributes” (Mirror Mirror). Although the standards of beauty have fluctuated over various eras, Mary Shelley confronted many concepts of beauty in her novel, Frankenstein. According to Face Research, one reoccurring standard of beauty is symmetry, as “...Evolutionary Advantage view suggests that attraction to symmetric individuals reflects attraction to healthy individuals...” This suggests that facial symmetry and human perception of beauty

<br>A Swiss Proverb once enlightened, "When one shuts one eye, one does not hear everything". Sadly, vision is the primary sense of mankind and often the solitary basis of judgment. Without human's limitations of the shapes, colors and textures of our overall outward appearances, the world would be a place that emphasizes morals, justice and intelligence rather than bravado, cuteness, and sexual attraction. For if there were no predetermined ideal models defining the beautiful possibilities of the human body's variation, one would never suffer isolation due to one's

The evolutionary advantage theory proposes that symmetric individuals are attractive because they are particularly healthy, and the perceptual bias theory proposes that symmetric individuals are attractive because the human visual system can process symmetric stimuli of any kind more easily than it can process asymmetric

It reinforces our understanding of how we mentally judge/assess people using "snap" and "systematic" judgements. The article shows that goodlooking people are attracted to other goodlooking people most likely because they subconsiously trust them and feel like they are virtuous people based on their looks because of the social stereotype and perceiver expectation that reinforce that thinking. On the other hand, the article and the experiments reinforce our understanding that when two people are friends for a relatively long time, they move onto "systematic" judgements that allow them to make more in-depth and more accurate evaluation of each other. They do so by observing the behaviour and understanding the motives, thoughts and feelings of

Biologists believed that facial symmetry should be attractive because it may signal mate quality. Rhodes, Proffit, Grady and Sumich (1998) manipulated the symmetry to figure out the effect on attractiveness. 4 versions of a picture were created. One was perfectly symmetric, the others were a highly symmetric version, normal level of symmetry and a low symmetric version.64 subjects rated these faces. The results clearly stated that perfect symmetry was significantly more attractive and low symmetry faces were unattractive, more over the males found the perfect symmetric faces more appealing as potential life partners, so facial symmetry does play a role in mate selection. In the second experiment the authors compared the attractiveness of faces at three symmetry levels. These were normal, high and perfect. The subjects were shown two versions of the same face at different

Jones, W., Hansson, R., & Phillips, A. (1978). Physical attractiveness and judgments of psychopathology. The Journal of Social Psychology, 105, 79-84.

Berne, Frisén, and Kling (2014) discussed how two previous studies had been conducted that found, among other reasons, that appearance was the most common reported reason for

In a study carried out by Byrne (1971) found that strangers with similar attitudes to participants were rated as being more physically attractive in comparison to participants which had dissimilar attitudes.