The generality and ultimate origins of the attractiveness of prototypes.
The relationship between category structure and affect, a core question about the affect-cognition interface, has been largely ignored by both literatures, with the exception of studies on the attractiveness of computer-averaged faces. This article reviews a number of the authors' recent and unpublished studies that demonstrate a robust positive correlation between prototypicality and attractiveness across diverse categories, and that systematically explore several hypotheses about the ultimate, that is, evolutionary, origins of this bias. A tentative dual-origin explanation is offered, in which prototypes of animal categories are preferred as a generalization of a mate-selection adaptation designed for human faces; coincidentally prototypes of artifacts (and possibly natural, nonanimal categories) are preferred by virtue of their subjective familiarity.
Halberstadt
Jamin
J
Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. jhalbers@psy.otago.ac.nz
D000339:Affect; D001504:Beauty; D003071:Cognition; D005145:Face; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012928:Social Desirability