Sex of the Face in Western Art: Left and Right in Portraits

Abstract

The relationship between observers' taste and the sitter's face orientation as function of sitter sex in painted portraits was investigated. The historical tendency in portraiture is that the sitter's left side of the face is more likely than the right to be turned towards the viewer and this side bias is stronger with women than with men. Correctly oriented and reversed museum portraits were viewed by subjects who gave ratings of "liking" the portrait as a whole (Experiment 1) and for "attractiveness" of the sitter (I?periment 2). Only portraits of women showed a left-right difference With right favored significantly over left, irresrective of orientation or type of rating. These findings go against the historica pattern of the sex-related bias in portraiture. They suggest that most women are painted in an orientation which is less favorable to them.

Hemifacial preferences for the perception of emotion and attractiveness differ with the gender of the one beheld

“…Whereas past chimeric face (Chen et al, 1997;Zaidel et al, 1995) and fine art (Zaidel & Fitzgerald, 1994) research has reported no clear cheek preference for males, the present results suggest a different pattern when judging naturalistic photos. For male models, a left cheek attractiveness preference was conspicuous for original orientation images (64.8% left cheek selections), but there was no clear cheek preference for mirror-reversed images.…”

“…As a happy expression makes an attractive face more rewarding (O'Doherty et al, 2003), it should be no surprise that participants deemed the happier side of both male and female models' faces more attractive. Given that these preferences were observed for natural, photographic portraits of models, rather than chimeric faces (e.g., Chen et al, 1997) or fine art paintings (Zaidel & Fitzgerald, 1994), it is probable that the effects observed in the present study have more direct application to the real world. Further research will determine whether these preferences observed for naturalistic static photographs extend to moving images and everyday interactions.…”

“…The present study was designed to determine whether the right cheek attractiveness bias previously reported for fine art (Zaidel & Fitzgerald, 1994) and chimeric faces (Chen et al, 1997;Zaidel et al, 1995) extends to natural portraits, and assess whether cheek preferences for emotion (typically left) and attractiveness (typically right) are indeed opposite. We asked participants to examine pairs of photos depicting left and right cheek poses of models asked to adopt a natural, friendly expression, and make a forced choice indicating which image was (a) more attractive and (b) more emotive (happier).…”

“…Intriguingly, the few studies that have examined asymmetries in the perception of attractiveness point toward a right cheek preference, the opposite of that noted for the perception of emotion. For example, when Zaidel and Fitzgerald (1994) asked participants to rate a series of fine art portraits on the basis of attractiveness, they found a significant right cheek preference for portraits of females, with no clear bias for portraits of males. Subsequently Zaidel, Chen, and German (1995) asked participants to rate leftÁleft and rightÁright chimeric face composites for attractiveness.…”

When advertising turns “cheeky”!

“…In fact, Zaidel and Fitzgerald (1994) found that participants rated right-biased images of females as being more attractive, although this was not observed for pictures of males (Zaidel, Chen, & German, 1995). As attractiveness is a powerful persuader (Caballero & Solomon, 1984), it may be that attractiveness is more powerful than emotional content in images used as advertising.…”