Steven M. Platek of Georgia Gwinnett College and Devendra Singh of University of Texas at Austin have found out that "Optimal Waist-to-Hip Ratios in Women Activate Neural Reward Centers in Men" or in layman terms, sexy hot woman can cause the same affect as alcohol.
The study might be a common knowledge or common sense for men, but something completely new for women. Please note, this study is a great argument when you are caught ogling at a sexy woman by your spouse or girlfriend.....
The Study
Brains of 14 men with the average age of 25 were scanned using MRI machines while they were asked to make attractiveness ratings to randomly and individually presented pictures of seven naked women (One picture from the rear and one from an oblique rear position) -
- One before cosmetic surgery
- One after cosmetic surgery that improved the waist to hip ratio by redistributing fat from their waists to the hips. The overall weight was kept constant.
Check the MRI Scan results -
Our observed activation patterns in the brain suggest that female body configuration represents a salient stimulus to men and that optimal female body configurations activate areas of men's brains that are associated with reward processing and appetitive behaviors. This activation may represent the proximate neural mechanism of attraction to females that express curvaceous body types and also further account for cross-cultural findings showing that optimal WHR (~.7) as being consistently rated as attractive. Lastly, this finding may extend our understanding of some men's proclivity to develop a preoccupation with stimuli depicting optimally designed women (e.g., pornography). Interestingly, our findings did not demonstrate that BMI had a large effect on brain activation except in areas associated with simple visual evaluations of shape and size. This does not downplay the importance of BMI in evaluations of female attractiveness, but may suggest that BMI's role in these evaluations is less the product of evolved psychological mechanisms and more the part of culturally driven, or societal based norms and perceptions.
