Beauty Affects Men and Women Differently?

February 23, 2009 2:46 PM

He Saw, She Saw.According to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, beauty may affect men's and women's brains in different ways.
posted by sarabeth (33 comments total)

There's a line in Douglas Coupland's Shampoo Planet, where a young Frenchwoman, after being kissed spontaneously by a young American dude, says "We are animals. When we see a thing of beauty, our first instinct is to eat it."

I'll buy that.
posted by jonmc at 2:53 PM on February 23 [1 favorite]

This is exactly why women never find my Dr. Zaius action figure beautiful.
posted by Bernt Pancreas at 3:04 PM on February 23

Please, a single-link post to an exceptionally fluffy science piece in what has become one of the most vapid technology rags on the newsstand is not "the best of the web" and if you are going to do a science piece, don't waste our time by doing it without a link to the primary source.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:06 PM on February 23 [1 favorite]

This is exactly why women never find my Dr. Zaius action figure beautiful.

Clearly, you're just meeting the wrong women.
posted by sarabeth at 3:06 PM on February 23 [1 favorite]

Please, a single-link post to an exceptionally fluffy science piece in what has become one of the most vapid technology rags on the newsstand is not "the best of the web" and if you are going to do a science piece, don't waste our time by doing it without a link to the primary source.

Thanks for the constructive criticism. Duly noted.
posted by sarabeth at 3:07 PM on February 23

one of the most vapid technology rags on the newsstand

Do they get any points for illustrating "beauty" with a Rothko painting?

Cause if not, yeah, shame, shame! on the poster. Go stand in a corner of the Internet and think about what you've done.
posted by Joe Beese at 3:10 PM on February 23

Ummm... What is the thesis statement of this article?
posted by rageagainsttherobots at 3:11 PM on February 23

...most vapid technology rags on the newsstand

For a moment I thought you were calling PNAS vapid and I was going to be offended since they kindly published my research. Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals, on the other hand, please bash all you want.
posted by sararah at 3:40 PM on February 23

So, now when I gawk at the hottie walking down the street, and my wife catches me, I can claim, "Neurobiology made me do it."

You know, instead of my current excuse: "Isn't that your niece? Wow, she really looks like your niece!"
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:40 PM on February 23 [1 favorite]

I thought the study only showed that men & women use different areas of the brain for processing visual information (men: areas associated with absolute position; women: areas associated with relative position).

I can't see how they added any value by throwing "beauty" (in the form of artworks) into the mix.
posted by UbuRoivas at 3:41 PM on February 23

The subjects varied as to what they considered beautiful, but brain patterns were consistent: coordinate-processing activation in both men and women, and category-processing in only women.

As best as I can tell, men and women are both excited by beauty, but women may find it easier to describe it in words. But that may just be a weird area of my cortex getting overexcited, so don't take my word on it.

(To avoid confounding by romantic regions of the brain, close-up images of people were not included.)

Err ..

1) What are the romantic areas of the brain?
2) Did the researchers never hear of Rule 34? How did they know they weren't activating the shoe-loving, furry-loving, vinyl-loving areas of the brain?
posted by maudlin at 3:43 PM on February 23

Those poor hunter-gatherers get blamed for everything.
posted by cogneuro at 3:45 PM on February 23 [2 favorites]

Thanks for linking to the actual article, KirkJobSluder. Since I have university access to PNAS I went ahead and read the article. From the abstract: We have used magnetoencephalography to record the brain activity of 10 male and 10 female participants while they decided whether or not they considered examples of artistic and natural visual stimuli to be beautiful.

No good scientist would actual surmise anything about billions of subjects from 20 subjects. I say this as a biologist. Especially since they made absolutely no attempt to control for cultural effects. The only hypotheses they even explore are whether the capacity for the appreciation of beauty evolved in early humans or in pre-human primates.

Other amusing quotes: The most obvious explanation for the perception of beautiful features in objects, and for the tendency to decorate the human body, is sexual selection. The is apparently so obvious to the authors that they offer no citation for what strikes me as a distinctly unobvious explanation to many scientists, not to mention artists.

Their nod to the possibility that the perceived gender differences are due to environmental effects is a brief dismissal in the final paragraph of the discussion: It could be argued, against this scenario, that differences between women and men regarding spatial strategies are the result of the particular conditions and gender roles that have become established in developed societies. However, an experimental study involving 7 extant ethnic groups, has provided support to the hunter-gatherer hypothesis of human spatial gender differences. In all 7 hunter-gatherer groups, men scored significantly higher than women did in a test of 3-dimensional mental rotations.

You see what they did there? They assumed that modern hunter-gatherers have no culture, which is of course nonsense. Modern hunter-gatherers have a culture, of course, and their culture includes gender roles which affect which skills one learn and thus affect one's mental spatial abilities.

So, yes, this article is another example of evolutionary psychology in which one can take 20 Spanish college students and surmise things about the entirety of human existence.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:49 PM on February 23 [6 favorites]

metafilter: one can cannot take 20 Spanish college students and surmise things about the entirety of human existence.
posted by ornate insect at 3:59 PM on February 23 [1 favorite]

Seems like a good time to repost Evolutionary Psychology Bingo!
posted by jokeefe at 4:16 PM on February 23 [10 favorites]

hydropsyche's post totally has the "I can rotate three-dimensional objects in my mind and you can't" square covered.
posted by jokeefe at 4:17 PM on February 23 [2 favorites]

"So, yes, this article is another example of evolutionary psychology in which one can take 20 Spanish college students and surmise things about the entirety of human existence."

You missed the "talkative women" trope at the end!

(That was something my linguistics prof had to debunk, like, a thousand goddamn times against the culturally-received force of anecdote, and something that my Interpersonal Communication prof kept affirming, unthinking.)
posted by klangklangston at 4:28 PM on February 23 [1 favorite]

No good scientist would actual surmise anything about billions of subjects from 20 subjects.

That is a strong accusation. 20 is actually a pretty robust number for a neuroimaging study. Check out the literature. You won't find much imaging work with a higher number of subjects. The cost of running a magnet is extremely prohibitive.

I say this as a biologist

I say this as a neuroimager.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 4:56 PM on February 23

In men, images they consider to be beautiful appear to activate brain regions responsible for locating objects in absolute terms — x- and y-coordinates on a grid. Images considered beautiful by women do the same, but they also activate regions associated with relative location: above and behind, over and under.

I'm not sure that I understand this.

Is it saying that (for example) women see a nose as being above a mouth, whereas men see a nose as being an inch above a mouth?

If not something along those lines, I'm having a hard time differentiating "x an y coordinates" from "above and behind, over and under".
posted by Flunkie at 5:03 PM on February 23

I can't see how they added any value by throwing "beauty" (in the form of artworks) into the mix.

To explain this a bit further...assuming that they aren't suggesting that beauty causes men to switch into absolute-coordinate-mode & women into relative-position-mode, it must mean that absolute v relative processing is what helps men & women decide whether something is beautiful or not.

In which case, it should make no difference whether the object being evaluated is beautiful, ugly or neither. The same areas of the brain would be involved in making that evaluation.

In other words, it doesn't sound like they've properly controlled for beauty as a variable in their study.

I say this as a pataphysician.
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:08 PM on February 23

I'm interested in being a participant in part 2 of the study: The Effects Of Beer On Perception Of Beauty In The Human Male Brain.
posted by jamstigator at 5:26 PM on February 23

Now I'm reading it differently (but I still don't think I understand it correctly). Specifically, they say "women do the same, but (additionally blah blah blah)".

So women see:

• A nose at position (0,1)
• A mouth at position (0,0)
• The nose as being above the mouth

Whereas men see:

• A nose at position (0,1)
• A mouth at position (0,0)

But apparently do not see the nose as being above the mouth?

I think something got lost in the translation from "scientistese" to "science correspondentese".
posted by Flunkie at 5:55 PM on February 23

20 is actually a pretty robust number for a neuroimaging study. Check out the literature. You won't find much imaging work with a higher number of subjects. The cost of running a magnet is extremely prohibitive.

Well then that is a limitation of the technique and what you can say from a study using it. If that is all the people you can study for a single study, then you've got to control for variables. Maybe this study says something about the neuroimages of the differences between men and women in the population of students at this particular university in Spain, but I just don't see how any conclusions can be drawn about every person on earth with that many confounding variables which were not in any way accounted for in the study.

In other words, these people had plenty of things about them in common that could also be significant besides biological sex, but that was the only variable used to interpret the data.

I do prohibitively expensive ecological research that requires a large time and labor investment in addition to fancy equipment, which limits my sample size to about 12 streams at a time. And so I only draw conclusions about streams in this particular small geographic area which are about the same size and have the same general watershed conditions and vegetative cover. I can make hypotheses about how the confounding variables might be influencing my results, but drawing larger conclusions about all streams on earth from my little studies would be irresponsible.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:15 PM on February 23 [1 favorite]

20 is actually a pretty robust number for a neuroimaging study. Check out the literature. You won't find much imaging work with a higher number of subjects. The cost of running a magnet is extremely prohibitive.


Which has zero to do with whether 20 is a good enough sample size to make surmises about humanity with. Regardless of how expensive it is to run a test, running that test on 20 people does not make the result more powerful because the test is expensive. I don't care what the test is, a sample size of 20 is useless.
posted by spicynuts at 6:28 PM on February 23

What's an appropriate number then? 100? 1000? Granted, neuroimaging is still in its infancy, but it has taught us a damn lot about the way the brain works. I'm not saying that there isn't controversy surrounding its implementation and implications, but we have to do the best science we can within the limitations imposed on us. I'm also not defending this particular study, but unless you want to join the "fMRI is the new phrenology" camp, you have to accept that these are the kinds of n's we work with.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 6:59 PM on February 23

I don't care what the test is, a sample size of 20 is useless.

Useless is an overly strong term, I think. The smaller sample size may make it more vulnerable to accidents of probability or methodological flaws, but said flaws are probably a better avenue of criticism than sample size, and if you're worried about accidents of probability, you repeat the study with a bigger/better sample.
posted by weston at 7:14 PM on February 23

Flunkie, I believe the basic difference articulated in the article is that men perceive location with reference to absolute position, while women perceive it relative to other objects. So, a man would likely give directions like "go 2 miles west and then turn south for a half mile or so" etc., while a woman may say "go a couple miles that way until you pass the church, then turn left at the gas station" etc. A glib example, but I suppose that it benefited the hunter to keep a birds-eye view in the imagination, and a gatherer to pay attention to details and context.

That those areas of the brain were activated in viewing the art seems to be the surprise.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:24 PM on February 23

What's an appropriate number then? 100? 1000? Granted, neuroimaging is still in its infancy, but it has taught us a damn lot about the way the brain works.

Imaging studies like this one really haven't taught us that much about how the brain works. This is another in a long line of neuro imaging studies primarily designed for press releases. The general way you do it is find a way to spilt a population into two provacative groups, stick them in an FMRI and expose them to some stimulus based around vague, but marketable concept. For this study the groups are males and females and the stimuli is beauty. Another classic of the genre used democrats and republicans and "fear and threat" as the stimuli.

The problem with these studies is that the criteria for the pictures used as stimulus is so vague that it is really hard to figure out what the brain is responding to. Maybe subjects looked more closely at the images they found beautiful, using more brain power to study them. Then it wouldn't be surprising that their would be differences in the male and female groups since we already know that they process images differently.

If using FMRIs is so expensive, other scientists should be up in arms that they are being wasted with crap studies like this. This post is an example of an awesome brain imaging study, but since it has nothing to do with gender, politics or sex it didn't get any press.
posted by afu at 12:16 AM on February 24

I thought the study only showed that men & women use different areas of the brain for processing visual information (men: areas associated with absolute position; women: areas associated with relative position).

I can't see how they added any value by throwing "beauty" (in the form of artworks) into the mix.

Yes. See also hydropsyche's comments. Another poorly-designed experiment, riddled with erroneous assumptions and extrapolating far beyond its results to produce conclusions that will look good as headlines in the science section of your newspaper. Like so many other studies that make erroneous and inflated claims about gender differences.

20 people is pretty standard for a neuroimaging experiment, say friends in relevant fields. That still doesn't mean it's a sufficient sample size.
posted by foxy_hedgehog at 12:41 AM on February 24

If using FMRIs is so expensive, other scientists should be up in arms that they are being wasted with crap studies like this. This post is an example of an awesome brain imaging study, but since it has nothing to do with gender, politics or sex it didn't get any press.

I don't get particularly excited when people conduct bad imaging studies, but it happens. If I was asked to provide a review of a shoddy fMRI study, you can bet your ass I'd come down harshly.

My beef, which I suppose was sort of a derail, was with the accusation that using 20 subjects for a study constitutes bad science, which is absolutely untrue. You do your best to pick a representative sample, but is any realistically gathered sample going to accurately represent the whole of humanity? Should every sample be a microcosm of the whole world? It would be nice, sure, but it's never going to happen.

That paper on the mapping the core of the cortex is indeed pretty radical. Research on the default network is exploding with advances in DSI and DTI, and I couldn't be more stoked. The reason studies like this don't get as much press, however, is because they're a lot more difficult to explain.

If you're getting your science information from a lay publication, you're going to run into a lot of crappy interpretations of good science and probably a few halfway decent interpretations of crappy science.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 5:53 AM on February 24

No, 20 subjects alone does not constitute crappy science and that was not what I was saying. 20 subjects properly selected from a population can be quite useful in describing that population.

What this study shows is that there are some interesting differences in brain imaging while viewing certain images between men and women at this university. This suggests this might be an area for future study. Possible confounding factors include the choice of images used, age of subjects, geographic specificity, and obvious cultural factors that derive from all subjects being chosen from a single (relatively young) age group and from a single culture with its own particular issues of gender.

In summary, again, my problem is not with the sample size alone, it is with using the sample size of a particular population to draw conclusions about billions of people not contained within that population.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:01 AM on February 24

Generalizing can always be dangerous. The accusation has long been laid that psychology is actually the study of undergraduate psychology students. This is a real problem, and one we're trying to curb by expanding research to alternative populations, but it can be difficult to do.

I apologize for getting reactionary. After a long day of crunching numbers on a mere 12 subjects, the suggestion that 20 isn't enough filled me with panic and I got defensive. Sorry.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 7:30 AM on February 24

Meh. Your favorite neuropsychological study sucks.
posted by Samizdata at 11:13 AM on February 24