A curvaceous woman is more than may a turn on for guys - hourglass figures are a drug that triggers the brains pleasure centers the same as drink and drugs, claim researchers.
Before you point to Hugh Hefner’s bank account researcher and evolutionary cognitive neuroscientist Steven Platek points out “there’s more to it than buying Playboy, Maxim, or FHM.”
Shapely hips in women are linked with fertility and overall health. As such, it makes sense evolutionarily speaking that studies across cultures have shown.
Previous research suggests women respond to large shoulder small waist proportions approaching the golden ratio, promoted by The Adonis Effect body sculpting program.
Researchers asked 14 Men, average age 25 to explicitly rate randomly presented pictures of seven naked female bodies while being scanned by fMRI.
The women’s bodies were shown before and after they underwent cosmetic surgery to give them shapely hips.
The surgery redistributed fat from the waist and buttocks but did not reduce overall weight.
Brain imagery reveals that changes in a women’s BMI only activate men’s visual brain areas used to evaluate size and shape. This may suggest that body fat is a societal rather than neurologically driven judgment of beauty.
However, the reward processing and decision-making anterior cingulate cortex activated to changes in womens Weight Height Ratio (WHR).
These brain areas are associated with responses to drugs and alcohol.
“The media portrays women as wholly too skinny,” Platek said. “It’s not just about body fat, or body mass index.”
“These findings could help further our understanding pornography addiction and related disorders, such as erectile dysfunction in the absence of pornography,” said Platek. They may also assist in researching sexual infidelity.
The effects of an attractive figure have on the female brain could be a future research topic.
“It turns out women find similar optimally attractive female bodies as attention-grabbing, albeit for different reasons,” Platek said.
“Women size up other women in an effort to determine their own relative attractiveness and to maintain mate guarding — or, in other words, keep their mate away from optimally designed females.”
Plaitek cautions these findings should not be construed as saying that men are solely programmed by their biology, nor that “women without optimal design should just hang up their mating towel,”
Platek and Devendra Singh published the study Optimal Waist-to-Hip Ratios in Women Activate Neural Reward Centers in Men online in the journal PLoS ONE.
