Definition
“Body attractiveness” refers to judgments of the human physical form that excludes facial cues. It could refer to judgments of any human bodily characteristic, either in isolation or as a whole.
Introduction
Evolutionary psychological theories have been used to explain judgments of attractiveness of a range of human morphological traits, typically in isolation of other traits. The aim of this section is not to provide a comprehensive account of all such application of evolutionary psychological theories but rather to provide several key examples, beginning with what is perhaps the most widely cited of such theories: the waist-to-hip ratio hypothesis of women’s body attractiveness.
The Waist-to-Hip Ratio Hypothesis
According to some evolutionary psychologists, a key problem faced by ancestral human populations was the identification of mate value. To overcome this problem, “perceptual mechanisms” are argued to have evolved in ancestral populations to detect and use...
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References
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Swami, V. (2016). Body Attractiveness. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1882-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1882-1
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