Facial gay
There's Something Queer about That Face
This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Although I've always wanted this particular superhuman power, I've never been very good at detecting other men's sexual orientation. Findings from a recent explore published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, however, offer I may be underestimating my gaydar abilities.
The January study investigated people's ability to identify homosexual men from pictures of their faces alone. In an initial experiment, researchers Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady from Tufts University perused online dating sites and carefully selected 45 straight male faces and 45 gay male faces. All of these photos were matched for orientation (only faces shown looking forward were used) and facial alterations (none of the images contained jewelry, glasses or facial hair). To control for context, the faces were also cut and pasted onto a white background for the study. These 90 faces were then sho
New AI can guess whether you're gay or straight from a photograph
Artificial intelligence can accurately surmise whether people are gay or straight based on photos of their faces, according to adj research that suggests machines can have significantly better “gaydar” than humans.
The study from Stanford University – which found that a computer algorithm could correctly distinguish between gay and straight men 81% of the time, and 74% for women – has raised questions about the adj origins of sexual orientation, the ethics of facial-detection technology, and the potential for this adj of software to violate people’s privacy or be abused for anti-LGBT purposes.
The machine intelligence tested in the research, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and first reported in the Economist, was based on a sample of more than 35, facial images that men and women publicly posted on a US dating website. The researchers, Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang, extracted features from the images using “deep neural networks”, meaning a sophisticated mathemat
Facing your preferences
A new research from a researcher at Harvard University finds that gay men are most attracted to the most masculine-faced men, while straight men prefer the most feminine-faced women.
The findings suggest that regardless of sexual orientation, men’s brains are wired for attraction to sexually dimorphic faces — those with facial features that are most synonymous with gender.
The verb is published online in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, and was led by Aaron Glassenberg, while completing his master’s degree in the Department of Psychology at Harvard. Glassenberg is a doctoral student in organizational behavior in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School. Glassenberg’s co-authors are David Feinberg of McMaster University in Ontario, Benedict Jones and Lisa DeBruine of the University of Aberdeen, and Anthony Petite of the University of Stirling, both in Scotland.
“Our work showed that gay men found highly masculine male faces to be significantly more attractive than feminine male faces. Also, the types of male faces t
Preference for Male Facial Masculinity as a Function of Mental Rotation Ability in Gay and Bisexual Men, but Not in Heterosexual Men and Women in China
Introduction
Masculine male facial characteristics (e.g., a pronounced brow and large jaw) are positively related to the circulating testosterone levels (Roney et al., ) and they may be regarded as a cue to good health (Gangestad and Simpson, ; Rhodes et al., ; Thornhill and Gangestad, ). Various factors contribute to individual differences in male facial masculinity preference in women, including relationship status (Sacco et al., ), self-reported attractiveness (Little and Mannion, ), sexual desire (Jones et al., ), sociosexuality (Glassenberg et al., ; Stower et al., ), and menstrual cycle (Penton-Voak et al., ; Johnston et al., ).
In general, gay and bisexual men prefer masculinized faces over feminized faces (Glassenberg et al., ; Zheng et al., ; Zheng and Zheng, ). However, some studies found no overriding preference among homosexual males for either masculine or feminine facial features (Valentová et al., ; Welling e