Human Facial Display Experiment

ON FEMALE'S FACIAL DISPLAYS AND AFFECT

This article reports research on the effects of perceived physical attractiveness of a target individual on female viewers' facial muscle activity and self-reported emotion. The experiment had the female subjects view slides of both men and women of varying physical attractiveness. Women who viewed pictures of other women found the attractive subjects to be more arousing to them than the less-attractive subjects. Similarly, the women had greater arousal response to pictures of good-looking men than to pictures of less-handsome men. The researcher decided that the women had the reaction they did to the same-sex subjects due to a defensive reaction from viewing a high-status competitor.

Darwin was the first to claim that human facial display has been both a reflection of the individual's current emotional state and a means of communicating social and emotional information. When people first meet, cues about the other's social status, dominance standing, and mate potential should be particularly important variables that influence the receivers behavior and emotions. One individual characteristic that has been found to be associated with perceptions of social success, social competence, and mate potential is physical attractiveness.

It is known that physical attractiveness is the most important characteristic that males u