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Passionate lovers idealise their partners' faces
New York, March 30
Women who are passionately
in love idealise their partners' faces, according to a new study which
tried to find out how love affects people's perception of their
partners' appearances.
For the study, heterosexual women were
presented with two computer-generated male faces. Both originated from
the same base image, but with "noise" overlaid to make them slightly
different, Bustle reported.
Participants were asked to choose the
face that looked most like their partner, after which they completed a
Passionate Love Scale. Based on their answers to the survey, they were
classified as being in high or low-passionate love. Researchers then
created an "average" face for each group to approximate how each group
of women viewed their partners.
A separate group of women rated the trustworthiness, competence and, of course, attractiveness of these average faces.
Researchers from Bilkent University and Indiana University teamed up for the study, published in PLOS One.
The
researchers found that, overall, the representations of partners
created by high-passion women were rated by other women as more
trustworthy, competent, and attractive than those in the low-passion
group.
The researchers pointed out that it was highly unlikely
for all the high-passion women to have wildly attractive partners, so it
must mean that they idealise their significant others.
Previous
research has established that idealising your partner is an important
feature of passionate love. In fact, it's even been associated with
longer and happier relationships because it creates a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
When people think their partner is a bombshell, they
excuse things that would normally bother them to no end, just because
they think their significant other is awesome.