Reminder: Research Theories of Personality Traits

Rogers and Maslow
Environment enforces abilities

Book: "Flow" Psychology of Optimal Experiences

You Lookin At Me?

Twenty volunteers looked at faces with exaggerated or reduced male or female features. The faces had been digitally morphed to look either more or less masculine or feminine.

As the faces flashed on a computer screen, the volunteer was supposed to hit a key as quickly as possible to indicate whether the face was looking at or away from him or her.

Both women and men reacted more quickly when the face had exaggerated sexual characteristics.

"Women were quickest to classify gaze direction when they were looking at hunky, masculine-looking guys. Guys were quicker when they were looking at pretty, feminine women," Jones said.

Brain and Cognition

I believe this can be argued till the death. A good thing to try and prove positive or negative.


"There are two reflexive attention systems: one that is mediated subcortically and triggered by abrupt onsets; and one that is mediated cortically and triggered by perceived gaze direction. Moreover, our findings add to a growing body of evidence that reflexive shifts of attention in response to gaze direction are cortically mediated."
(Chris Kelland Friesena,*, Chris Mooreb, Alan Kingstonec)

Men and the Female form

"According to the study men take the same pleasure out of looking at an attractive female form as they do from having a curry or making money whereas women do not take any significant reward from looking at pictures of men."

Direct Gaze

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080813095722.htm

"The results of the research, which measured the function of the brain’s frontal lobes by means of electroencephalography (EEG), indicate that during the observation of a direct gaze the left frontal lobe of the test subjects was more active than the right frontal lobe. During the observation of an averted gaze the situation was opposite. The left-dominated activation asymmetry is linked to an approach and the right-dominated to avoidance. This was the first time it was shown through physiological measurements that another person’s gaze direction affects brain systems that are involved in the regulation of fundamental human motivational reactions."

Gaze and Beauty

http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/12457
"The findings show that human preferences may be more fundamentally tied to "feedback" between the very act of gazing and the internal, cognitive prototype of attractiveness than was formerly assumed. Earlier work by other researchers has relied on the "attractiveness template," which assumes that an individual's ideal conception of beauty has somehow been imprinted on his or her brain due to early exposures to other people's faces, such as the mother."

"The second experiment is "gaze manipulation," in which the faces are not shown simultaneously, but in sequences of varying duration on the two sides of the computer screen. In other words, one face was shown for a longer time (900 milliseconds) than the other face (300 milliseconds), and as a control, the faces were also shown to other subjects in the center of the screen in an alternating sequence."

Artists are Different

http://www.helium.com/items/1407392-what-makes-an-artist-different-from-the-average-person

An artist also asks the questions, " What is this and more importantly, why is this? What would happen if I changed just this one little thing?"