Abstract
Recent research has shown facial adiposity (apparent weight in the face) to be a significant predictor of both attractiveness and health, thus making it an important determinant of mate selection. Studies looking at the relationship between attractiveness and health have shown that individuals differentiate between the two by preferring a lower weight for attractiveness than for health in female faces. However, these studies have either been correlational studies, or have investigated weight perceived from only the face. These differences have been discussed with regard to sociocultural factors such as pressure from parents, peers and also media, which has been seen to have the highest influence. While exposure to media images has been shown to influence women’s own-body image, no study has yet directly tested the influence of these factors on people’s preferred weight in other women’s bodies. Here we examine how a short exposure to images of models influences men’s and women’s judgments of the most healthy looking and attractive BMI in Malaysian Chinese women’s bodies by comparing differences in preferences (for attractiveness and health) between groups exposed to images of models of varying attractiveness and body weight. Results indicated that participants preferred a lower weight for attractiveness than for health. Further, women’s but not men’s preferred BMI for attractiveness, but not health, was influenced by the type of media images to which they were exposed, suggesting that short term exposure to model images affect women’s perceptions of attractiveness but not health.
Highlights
Selecting a desirable mate of good quality is an important decision made by individuals, as it determines the quality and number of offspring they can produce
Body mass index (BMI, weight scaled for height) and, to a lesser extent, waist to hip ratio (WHR) have been shown to be important determinants of women’s physical attractiveness, with lower BMI and WHR preferred by both men and women [3,5,6], including in Malaysian populations [7]
This study found no evidence for the role of peer pressure on weight concerns, other studies suggest that peer influence is important
Summary
Selecting a desirable mate of good quality is an important decision made by individuals, as it determines the quality and number of offspring they can produce. Crossley et al [8] found that the ideal own body shape preferred by men was similar to women participants’ ideal partner body, and vice versa, suggesting a consistency in the preferred ideal BMI and body shape across both genders. Both men and women preferred a relatively lower BMI with a more curvaceous body for females, while a slightly heavier muscular V-shaped body was preferred for males
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