Beauty vs Symmetry
There has been made this study over babies in order to respond the question is: “Do babies have a genetic predisposition to favouring pretty faces rather than ugly ones?”
The doctor was completely surprise to find out that “there was a strong effect of attractive and unattractive photos on infants. I was convinced it was a learned process. Our research shows that perception of beauty is something genetic rather than socially constructed.”
They studied nearly 100 babies up to the age of three days and found a significant difference in the time babies looked at attractive and unattractive photographs.
“They would spend 60-65% of the time looking at the attractive face,” Slater said.
Slater’s team also swapped the internal features – eyes, nose and mouth – of the attractive face with those of the unattractive face.
Slater’s research team has interpreted the results of the study in a number of ways.
“The babies’ behavior could be down to a prototype formation, which is when you see lots of faces and form a prototype so you can recognize what a face looks like,” he said.
“Our understanding is that babies like to look at attractive faces because they most resembles the prototype they’ve got in their brains.
“Given that we’ve found this in newborn infants who haven’t seen that many faces it suggests that they come into the world with an in-built representation of a face which happens to correspond to an attractive face.”
Slater rejected the argument that perception of beauty is a learned process.
He said: “If the concept of beauty is an entirely learned characteristic then the public wouldn’t consistently pick the same people as being attractive. If it was learned, it would mean infants seizing on their mothers, whatever she looked like, would regard her as being attractive .
“This would lead some to regard people like Angelina Jolie as being less beautiful but that’s not the case.
“You may love your mother to bits but you will recognize that she is not the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Dr Gwyneth Doherty- Sneddon, senior psychology lecturer at Stirling University in child development, said: “A fair bit of evolutionary psychology has been done which suggests visual perception is innate, but I think culture has a role to play too. There will be innate predisposition but that’s not to say that that perception will continue throughout your life.
“I’d say most psychologists would like to think that there is an interplay between culture and what is inherent.”
Slater said: “You could say that beauty is in the eye of beholder to some extent, but there is some kind of external standard against which we judge people to be beautiful. This judgement appears to be part of a genetic inheritance.”
Source: http://sciconrev.org/
Source: politicsandarchitecturec1.blogspot.com
So babies recognize beauty before they can eat or walk by themselves.
But are we able to define beauty? Could it all be in the proportions ans symmetry?
Symmetrical patterns in nature have influenced artists and architects throughout history.
Is there a link between symmetry and beauty? Is symmetry the symbol of beauty?
Source: www.art.net
