Female physical attractiveness in Britain and Japan: a cross‐cultural study

By Viren Swami, C. Caprario, Martin J. Tovee, Adrian Furnham. 2006

111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Two purported cues to female physical attractiveness are body mass index (BMI) and body shape as measured by the waist‐to‐hip ratio (WHR). This study examined the relative contribution of both cues in two culturally distinct populations. Eighty‐two male participants from Britain and Japan were asked to rate a set of images of real women with known BMI and WHR. Results showed that BMI is the primary determinant of female physical attractiveness, whereas WHR failed to emerge as a significant predictor. Results also showed that there were significant differences in preferences for physical attractiveness, with Japanese participants preferring images of women with significantly lower BMIs than Britons. Finally, results showed that the Japanese are more reliant on body shape than Britons when judging physical attractiveness. The findings are discussed in terms of evolutionary psychological explanations of mate selection, and sociocultural theories which emphasise the learning of preferences in social and cultural contexts. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e6e19a861e0a5d8d590bf405d4f40425f76a4468

How researchers see this paper

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In Clinical Psychology

1. K. Pisanski
2. David Feinberg

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. K. Pisanski
2. David Feinberg
3. B. Jones

In Marketing

1. K. Pisanski
2. David Feinberg

Citations in the corpus

• Cross-Cultural Variation in Mate Preferences for Averageness, Symmetry, Body Size, and Masculinity (2013, result): “Sustenance factors cannot in any case explain differences that have been reported between, for example, Japanese and British men’s preferences (Swami et al., 2006) or the preferences of Zulu migrants and British natives”
• Americanized beauty? Predictors of perceived attractiveness from US and South Korean participants based on media exposure, ethnicity, and socio-cultural attitudes toward ideal beauty (2009, background): “Several studies have examined the relationship between BMI or waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) and female beauty (DeSoto, & Kopp, 2003 ; Fisher & Voracek, 2006 ; Swami, Caprario, Tovee, & Furham, 2006 ).”