In 1753, artist William Hogarth declared a specific S-shaped line to be the 'Line of Beauty' (LoB). Hogarth's assertion has had a profound impact on diverse fields over the past two and a half centuries. However, only one recent (2022) study has investigated whether Hogarth's assertion accurately captures humans' actual aesthetic preferences, and no research has explored why people find the LoB beautiful. We conducted two studies testing the hypothesis that the LoB's perceived beauty is an incidental by-product of cognitive systems that evolved to attend to fitness-relevant morphological features in people. In Study 1, we replicated the finding that female bodies whose lumbar curvature approximates the biomechanical optimum for dealing with the exigencies of pregnancy are rated as more attractive. In Study 2, we found that abstract lines extracted from these bodies were perceived as more beautiful than other lines. These results suggest that the preference for Hogarth's LoB is an incidental by-product of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other purposes. More broadly, these findings suggest that an evolutionary psychological approach - in particular the concept of evolutionary by-product - may be useful for understanding, explaining, and predicting people's aesthetic preferences for certain abstract symbols, which otherwise might seem arbitrary and inexplicable.

• MeSH
• biologická evoluce MeSH
• cvičení MeSH
• estetika MeSH
• krása * MeSH
• lidé MeSH
• těhotenství MeSH
• umění * MeSH
• Check Tag
• lidé MeSH
• těhotenství MeSH
• ženské pohlaví MeSH
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH
• práce podpořená grantem MeSH

Although the aesthetic appreciation of flowers is a well-known aspect of human behaviour, theories explaining its origin are missing. The only exception is the evolutionary theory of Heerwagen and Orians. Surprisingly, it has not yet been empirically tested. The authors suggest that humans aesthetically respond to flowers because they signal food availability. The logic of the theory implies that fruits are more reliable and direct food availability signals than flowers. Therefore, fruits should elicit stronger aesthetic responses than flowers. To test this assumption, we performed two online studies in the Czech Republic. The participants (n = 2792 and 744, respectively) indicated on a six-point scale their aesthetic response to photographs of 14 edible Czech plant species (study A) and 20 edible plant species from the African savannas (study B), varying in growth stage (flowering, fruiting). We found no difference between the Czech fruiting and flowering plants and a stronger aesthetic response to African flowering plants. A third study (n = 817) confirmed that flowers were preferred to fruits, using a forced-choice paradigm. Our results suggest that the theory cannot fully explain human aesthetic responses to flowers. We discuss alternative explanations. This topic deserves renewed attention from researchers working in related fields.

• Klíčová slova
• evolutionary aesthetics, flower preference, habitat selection, perception of flowers,
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH

There is no doubt that people find flowers beautiful. Surprisingly, we know very little about the actual properties which make flowers so appealing to humans. Although the evolutionary aesthetics provides some theories concerning generally preferred flower traits, empirical evidence is largely missing. In this study, we used an online survey in which residents of the Czech Republic (n = 2006) rated the perceived beauty of 52 flower stimuli of diverse shapes and colors. Colored flowers were preferred over their uncolored versions. When controlling for flower shape, we found an unequal preference for different flower colors, blue being the most and yellow the least preferred. In the overall assessment of beauty, shape was more important than color. Prototypical flowers, i.e., radially symmetrical flowers with low complexity, were rated as the most beautiful. We also found a positive effect of sharp flower contours and blue color on the overall rating of flower beauty. The results may serve as a basis for further studies in some areas of the people-plant interaction research.

• Klíčová slova
• Aesthetic preference, Beauty, Evolutionary aesthetics, Floral morphology, People-plant interactions, Phytophilia,
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH

In a previous study, we found that the shape of a bird, rather than its color, plays a major role in the determination of human preferences. Thus, in the present study, we asked whether the preferences of human respondents towards uniformly shaped, colorful birds are determined by pattern rather than color. The experimental stimuli were pictures of small passerine birds of the family Pittidae possessing uniform shape but vivid coloration. We asked 200 participants to rank 43 colored and 43 identical, but grayscaled, pictures of birds. To find the traits determining human preferences, we performed GLM analysis in which we tried to explain the mean preference ranks and PC axes by the following explanatory variables: the overall lightness and saturation, edges (pattern), and the portion of each of the basic color hues. The results showed that the mean preference ranks of the grayscale set is explained mostly by the birds' pattern, whereas the colored set ranking is mostly determined by the overall lightness. The effect of colors was weaker, but still significant, and revealed that people liked blue and green birds. We found no significant role of the color red, the perception of which was acquired relatively recently in evolution.

• MeSH
• barva * MeSH
• emoce MeSH
• estetika psychologie   MeSH
• lidé MeSH
• ptáci klasifikace   MeSH
• světelná stimulace metody   MeSH
• vnímání barev * MeSH
• výběrové chování fyziologie   MeSH
• zrak MeSH
• zvířata MeSH
• Check Tag
• lidé MeSH
• mužské pohlaví MeSH
• ženské pohlaví MeSH
• zvířata MeSH
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH
• práce podpořená grantem MeSH
• Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural MeSH

Focusing on one group of animals can bring interesting results regarding our attitudes toward them and show the key features that our evaluation of such animals is based on. Thus, we designed a study of human perception of all reptiles focusing on the relationship between perceived fear, disgust, and aesthetic preferences and differences between snakes and other reptiles. Two sets containing 127 standardized photos of reptiles were developed, with one species per each subfamily. Respondents were asked to rate the animals according to fear, disgust, and beauty on a seven-point Likert scale. Evaluation of reptile species shows that people tend to perceive them as two clearly distinct groups based on their similar morphotype. In a subset of lizards, there was a positive correlation between fear and disgust, while disgust and fear were both negatively correlated with beauty. Surprisingly, a positive correlation between fear and beauty of snakes was revealed, i.e., the most feared species also tend to be perceived as beautiful. Snakes represent a distinct group of animals that is also reflected in the theory of attentional prioritization of snakes as an evolutionary relevant threat.

• Klíčová slova
• beauty, disgust, emotions, fear, reptiles,
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH

It has been suggested that in threatening environments, both women and men should prefer more masculine men as romantic and coalition partners, respectively. Empirical evidence for this hypothesis has been weak or inconsistent, primarily because most experimental research has focused on elevating the perceived danger from other men through virtual threats. This study investigates whether personal experience with violence predicts the preference for masculine features in 326 Senegalese participants presented with pairs of manipulated facial photographs of West African men (one more feminine, one more masculine) and asked to indicate which face is more attractive (to women) or more trustworthy (to men). The findings reveal a strong association between violence exposure and facial feature preferences. Those who experienced (particularly physical) violence showed a higher preference for masculinized faces (up to 95% in women, 82% in men) compared to the baseline (57% in women, 63% in men). This difference is proposed to reflect an adaptive strategy of prioritizing physical protection in settings with a higher incidence of violent confrontations. Much of the variance can be found between groups. The direct effect of experienced violence diminishes over time, which suggests a dynamic interplay between innate predispositions and environmental influences on aesthetic preferences.

• Klíčová slova
• attractiveness, contextual preferences, evolutionary psychology, facial masculinity, trustworthiness, violence exposure,
• MeSH
• dospělí MeSH
• lidé MeSH
• mladiství MeSH
• mladý dospělý MeSH
• mužskost * MeSH
• obličej * MeSH
• vystavení násilí * psychologie   MeSH
• Check Tag
• dospělí MeSH
• lidé MeSH
• mladiství MeSH
• mladý dospělý MeSH
• mužské pohlaví MeSH
• ženské pohlaví MeSH
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH
• Geografické názvy
• Senegal MeSH

The aspects of facial attractiveness have been widely studied, especially within the context of evolutionary psychology, which proposes that aesthetic judgements of human faces are shaped by biologically based standards of beauty reflecting the mate quality. However, the faces of primates, who are very similar to us yet still considered non-human, remain neglected. In this paper, we aimed to study the facial attractiveness of non-human primates as judged by human respondents. We asked 286 Czech respondents to score photos of 107 primate species according to their perceived "beauty." Then, we analyzed factors affecting the scores including morphology, colors, and human-likeness. We found that the three main primate groups were each scored using different cues. The proportions of inner facial features and distinctiveness are cues widely reported to affect human facial attractiveness. Interestingly, we found that these factors also affected the attractiveness scores of primate faces, but only within the Catarrhines, i.e., the primate group most similar to humans. Within this group, human-likeness positively affected the attractiveness scores, and facial extremities such as a prolonged nose or exaggerated cheeks were considered the least attractive. On the contrary, the least human-like prosimians were scored as the most attractive group. The results are discussed in the context of the "uncanny valley," the widely discussed empirical rule.

• Klíčová slova
• colors, facial attractiveness, human preferences, primates, uncanny valley, visual cues, visual perception,
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH