Famous Sad Love Quotes: Why beauty really is in the eye of the beholder: Scientists say we rate our partners as more attractive than strangers

Friday, August 5, 2011

Why beauty really is in the eye of the beholder: Scientists say we rate our partners as more attractive than strangers

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By Daily Mail Reporter

Last updated at 6:11 PM on 5th August 2011

Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, according to a new study which found people rate their partners as more attractive than objective strangers do.

The 'positive illusion' about a partner's hotness may help keep relationships stable, researchers have reported.

Earlier studies suggested people rated their partners as especially kind and intelligent compared with other people but it was not known if this positive outlook extended to physical looks.

Is love blind? According to the study, couples rated the physical appeal of their partners higher than that of strangers

According to the website livescience, researchers from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands tested the idea with 70 heterosexual couples.

All the volunteers had their photograph taken, then half of the couples filled out a questionnaire about their ratings of their own attractiveness and their partner's attractiveness.

Next, they filled out some dummy questionnaires about other topics to throw them off the scent of the experimental question. After that, they got to look at the photo of themselves and their partners taken at the beginning of the session and were told to rate the attractiveness of both.

The other couples completed the same process, but looked at the photos first.

To prevent any relationship-ending revelations, the researchers promised that the men and women's answers would be confidential. Later, strangers went through all of the photographs and rated the attractiveness of each person in the experiment.

The results showed that both men and women consistently rated both their own hotness and that of their partner higher than the strangers did.

The researchers had thought that people might rate the photographs more objectively, since photos make awkward features hard to ignore, but that wasn't the case. Attractiveness ratings based on photos were only slightly lower than attractiveness ratings based on people's own memories.

The couples in the study ranged in age from 18 to 37, and the average length of relationships was between two and three years, though they ranged from three months to almost nine years.

Further study on older people and longer relationships is needed to understand how positive illusions change over time, the researchers wrote, adding that positive illusions are a good thing. Other studies have found that people who hold such illusions are happier in their relationships, experience less conflict, and report more love and trust.

But positive illusions can be troublesome if taken too far. In couples with rocky relationships, positive illusions are harbingers of trouble, because a too-rosy outlook allows real problems to fester.