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tags: behavior, evolution, humans, mate choice
A recent study has found a strong correlation between a woman's choice of a partner and her relationship with her father. Basically, the better she was treated by her father when she was a child, the more closely that her partner's face resembled her dad's.
The team's leader, Lynda Boothroyd from Durham University in the UK, said that her findings add to our understanding of how we become attracted to certain types of people. Such knowledge could have important implications for fields such as relationship counselling, she added.
In this study, Boothroyd and her colleagues at the University of Wroclaw and the Institute of Anthropology in Poland, asked women to rate 15 pictures of men's faces for attractiveness, and to assess their relationship with their fathers. The researchers identified 15 measurements from the men's various facial features, such as the lips, nose, cheekbones and brows. They then calculated how these features were related to each man's facial height and width as compared to the width of nose and lips, and then compared these values to those same values for the women's fathers. Using these measurements, the team found that women who had positive relationships with their fathers found that the most attractive men where those whose faces more closely resembled their father's.
"While previous research has suggested this to be the case, these controlled results show for certain that the quality of a daughter's relationship with her father has an impact on whom she finds attractive," Boothroyd said in a prepared statement. "It shows our human brains don't simply build prototypes of the ideal face based on those we see around us, rather they build them based on those to whom we have a strongly positive relationship."
Previously, it had been thought that people select partners who are similar to their parents because one's parents are the primary example from whom we learn species recognition. But this study makes evolutionary sense: women are operating under the subconscious assumption that men who look like their fathers might also act in a similar way. Thus, this has important implications for her future offspring.
The study was published in the journal, Evolution and Human Behaviour.
Sources
Yahoo News (quotes).
Comments
Perhaps more complicated then we thought explains my third marriage but does nothing to excuse the choices made in first two disasters!
My father, a Ph.D. Math and Physics Professor agonized over my choices of partners during my early years..
At last at the age of thirty-seven I met my father, and have had a good relationship for thirty years with a man who looks and acts a great deal like my father.
Interestingly, the anger component if my dad is not included. with this partner, but was a destructive part of earlier joining..
My choices of volatile personalities included this characteristic anger, the only failure of a good and decent man.
Posted by: judyroth@ | June 13, 2007 7:04 PM
Hmmm . . .
My daughter and I got along very well. Her (female) partner looks not at all like me . . .
Posted by: paul | June 14, 2007 9:08 AM
paul: Heh. My lesbian cousin married someone who looks somewhat like her mom, but even more like herself. Her actual sister doesn't look as much like her!
Judyroth: such flaws are intrinsically very "memorable" in a child's development, and the imprinting period is probably earlier than most people think (up to age 7 or so). Mature evaluations of someone's overall worth are, unfortunately, not involved in those stages of human development.
Posted by: David Harmon | June 15, 2007 3:56 PM
Hmmm...I'm always a little wary of studies that set out to look at the evolutionary underpinnings of gender relations, which are so overlaid with social/cultural stuff.
Some thoughts: (1) Women's tastes change throughout life, (2) we can be attracted to many different kinds of people, (3) we may be straight, gay, bi, etc.,
(4) can Brad Pitt really look like (nearly) every woman's father? :) (5) and lastly, female sexuality is very complex, and ascribing partner choice to some sort of evolutionary drive is a tenuous undertaking at best. Some women have multiple partners; some women are serially monogamous; studies like this one imagine an ideal woman who selects one partner for life in order to procreate, and I think that just doesn't adequately capture the range and complexity of female sexual behavior. So often these "evolutionary tales" have the feel of Just So stories to me.
Posted by: Zuska | June 18, 2007 5:34 PM
Interesting. I can provide anecdotal evidence for the reversal of their experiment -- I find men who resemble either of the "father" figures in my life actively unattractive. It seems to make sense that if in your memory "a good guy" resembles X, you will be inclined to find X attractive in the future.
Posted by: PennyBright | June 21, 2007 9:20 PM
I have a relation who we thought was over-protected. His first wife died shortly after his mother did. When I met his new wife a few years later I was astounded by how closely she resembled his mother in appearance, manner and voice. I found it distinctly unsettling and wondered if he was trying to find his mother.
Posted by: Richard Simons | June 21, 2007 11:55 PM
I parsed that headline wrong when I first clicked through here! Read it as "I'd Like To Marry A Man, Just Like Dear Old Dad" and thought I have to check this story out :-)
Posted by: Paul A | June 22, 2007 5:09 AM
Thus, should I expect my daughter's future husband to closely resemble her first "lovey," her teddy bear? It may be slightly disconcerting to welcome a fuzzy white fellow with glassy black eyes to my home. Especially when he has nothing to say.
Posted by: wenchacha | June 22, 2007 12:42 PM