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The waist-hip ratio and eyes dancers

Having a measure of human sexual attraction is not as simple as it seems. The morphological characteristics are certainly easier to measure, but other qualities, equally or more important, as the charm and sense of humor seem to be more elusive to accurate measurement. The waist-hip ratio was once regarded as a measure of the attractive female morphological irrefutable. In numerous studies in industrialized societies found that images of women with a low waist-hip ratio, ie, those who had little body like an hourglass, were considered more attractive by men.

No only these bodies were considered more attractive if there were also correlates with the levels of estrogen and progesterone, hormones that in turn are associated with cups of conception. Over the years, however, things have changed a bit and found that it is not so simple or direct.

William Blake illustration taken from Wikimedia Commons .

Some studies have found that preferences for body shape that vary in different cultures and other studies have shown that the perceived attractiveness also depends on the type of images are presented, for example, if images are front, side or rear. Recently, studies on attractiveness and sexual selection in humans have made use of the use of devices that measure eye movements of subjects under test. With these devices it is possible to know which body part the attention is fixed first, how many and which of these parts are fixed gaze and time spent in each of these activities. Measuring eye movements or the time during which there are certain characteristics has been used in morphological studies that measured physical attractiveness, although visual attention is a measure which has also been used in a variety of studies. Barbara J Dixson and a team of 3 colleagues from the University of Wellington in New Zealand recently used this type of apparatus for studying how people evaluate the female figure and how it relates this assessment to their views on the visual the appeal of these images. Their results were published recently in the journal Human Nature .

For their study used a color photograph a naked woman. This photograph was modified with PhotoShop to change the waist-hip ratio (ratio 0.7, 0.8 and 0.9) both a front and rear. Consequently, 6 images were created. A total of 30 heterosexual men aged 25 to 44 different images reviewed as a small machine recorded their eye movements. After this had to rate the attractiveness of each on a scale of 1 to 6.

Barbara and his colleagues then divided regions of the body for each type of image to analyze visual attention of men in these regions during the eye movement.

Body regions considered in the study. Image taken from the referenced article.

Their study, the first to analyze the ocular response to both front and rear images showed that those images where the waist-hip ratio was 0.7 were considered more attractive regardless of the pose ( front or rear).
As perhaps expected, the images eyes turned back in the region of the stomach and buttocks. When the images were observed frontal visual attention focused on the breasts (not unsurprisingly) but also in the stomach in those pictures where the waist-hip ratio was high.
In this sense, the study in question is the first to identify the importance of the abdomen in studies of female attractiveness, so surely the issue must be explored further in the future. This finding makes sense when one bears in mind what others have suggested about the hip-waist ratio in the sense that functions as a first filter in evaluating male female physical attractiveness.
Of course it is important to bear in mind that eye movements are not implicit measures of perceived attractiveness, simply point your attention to a certain region. That is, although physical attractiveness capture the attention of other mental processes may be involved when measuring visual attention.
In this sense, the study team at the University of Wellington also notes the usefulness of visual monitoring techniques in studies of sexual selection, the use of such techniques is relatively new to this type of study.
Finally, the evaluation of different body poses in the study of physical attractiveness is one of the strengths of this study. While for ordinary mortals may not sound very novel, the study of Barbara and his colleagues demonstrates scientifically the importance of images in the evaluation rear female physical attractiveness.
Reference article:

Dixson, B., Grimshaw, G., Linklater, W., & Dixson, A. (2010). Watching the Hourglass Human Nature, 21 (4), 355-370 DOI: 10.1007/s12110-010-9100-6