From Calibrated Morphs to Facial Stimuli: The Beauty of a Statistically Informed Picture
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Windhager, S., Schaefer, K., Fink, B., 2025. From Calibrated Morphs to Facial Stimuli: The Beauty of a Statistically Informed Picture. American Journal of Human Biology 37, e70048.
The interest in physical appearance and attractiveness is presumably much older than modern humans. The depiction of the human face and body is the subject of many artworks including the Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines (e.g., the Venus of Willendorf, c. 30 000 years ago) and many paintings and sculptures of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. The scientific inquiry into the systematic variation of physical appearance also has a long history. Egyptian artisans already used square grids and standard proportions to produce consistent depictions of human and other figures (Robins 1994). In “Modern Morphometrics in Physical Anthropology,” Dennis E. Slice (2005, 1) summarized more recent developments in the scientific inquiry of the human physique as follows: “Johann Sigismund Elsholtz formalized the scientific measurement of living individuals, anthropometry, in his 1654 Doctoral dissertation (Kolar and Salter 1996), and his particular interest in symmetry would appeal to many present-day anthropologists and general biologists. From the 19th century to the present day, the measurement and analysis of human beings and their skeletal remains have been a central theme in anthropology, though not always with beneficent motivation (e.g., Gould 1981). During this time, anthropologists have often taken advantage of the state-of-the-art in statistical methodology, but they have not been just passive consumers of technological innovation. Indeed, pervasive interest in our own species, its artifacts, and our closest relatives has motivated and contributed much to the development of statistical methods that are now taken for granted in areas far afield from anthropology. The early work of the biometric laboratory established by Galton and Pearson bears witness to the vital interplay between the development of statistical methodology and anthropological research (e.g., Mahalanobis 1928, 1930; Morant 1928, 1939; Pearson 1903, 1933).”