Physical Attractiveness: Factors affecting relationships

• Physical attractiveness: Important factor in forming romantic relationships; refers to how appealing an individuals face is.
• Matching hypothesis - Implies that we take our own attractiveness into account when seeking a partner as it is the belief that we do not select thoses who are the most attractive (also known as the computer dance).
• Shackelford and Larsen (1997) found people with symmetrical faces were seen as more attractive because it is an honest signal of genetic fitness.
• Shackelford and Larsen (1997) also found that those with baby faces were more attractive because it triggers a protective and caring instinct.
• What is the halo effect?

  Found by Dion et al that physically attractive people are rated more kind, sociable, successful etc, therefore believes that good looking people have these attributes which makes them more attractive so we behave more positively towards them
• Psychologists can use the halo effect to assess how attractiveness has a disproportionate effect on our judgements of another persons attributes.
• Walster et al carried out research on matching hypothesis where they found that the most liked partners were not the most physically attractive, instead, people were taking their own physical attractiveness into account and chose partners based on that.
• Berscheid replicated walsters study and found people chose partners who matched their physical attractiveness.
• We risk rejection in selecting the most attractive people and so tend to seek partners whos attractiveness matches our own therefore the choice of a partner is a compromise.