title: Determinants of hand attractiveness--a study involving digitally manipulated stimuli.
abstract: Although attractiveness of the human hand is of significance in the social and mating context, thus far it has attracted little scientific interest. In this study, young women and men were presented with pairs of digitally manipulated images of opposite-sex hands and asked to indicate the hand perceived to be the more attractive in each pair. The hands within a pair differed from one another by a single feature: shape averageness, femininity, finger length, second-to-fourth-digit ratio, or skin smoothness. All these features, with the exception of the digit ratio, were shown to increase hand attractiveness in each sex in both dorsal and ventral views. Skin smoothness was preferred more strongly in female than in male hands. Women also tended to prefer medium degrees of shape femininity and skin smoothness in male hands compared to both high and low levels. Adaptive and non-adaptive (related to perceptual bias) mechanisms underlying these preferences are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Anthropology, Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Umultowska 89, 61-614 Poznań, Poland. koscinski@amu.edu.pl
authors.forename: Krzysztof
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kościński
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001504:Beauty; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005260:Female; D006225:Hand; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D012737:Sex Factors; D055815:Young Adult