14 DAY TRIAL // Are you crazily in love with Brad Pitt? This means you had a bad relationship with your dad...
A new study shows that the type of man a woman is looking for has to do with how well she got along with her daddy, as a child. A good daughter-father bond means that in the future the woman will be attracted to men resembling her father, while a bad relationship means she will not.
Lynda Boothroyd, a psychologist at Durham University in England, with a Polish team at the University of Wroclaw and the Institute of Anthropology in Poland made facial measurements on the photographs of 15 random men and also of the fathers of 49 Polish female subjects.
This involved 15 key proportions implying the way various traits (like lips, nose, cheekbones and brows) correlated to each face's height and width. 15 random faces were compared to each of the father's faces to assess how closely they resembled one another.
The childhood bonds with women's fathers were assessed on how they felt the emotional involvement coming from their dads when raising them and the time fathers had spent with them.
The subjects were put to rate the attractiveness of each of the 15 random male faces. Those reporting positive relationships with their fathers were more predisposed to find attractive men resembling their dads. Instead, women who had a negative relationship with their fathers did not encounter appealing men looking like their fathers.
"While previous research has suggested this to be the case, these controlled results show for certain that the quality of a daughter's relationship with her father has an impact on whom she finds attractive. It shows our human brains don't simply build prototypes of the ideal face based on those we see around us, rather they build them based on those to whom we have a strongly positive relationship," said Boothroyd.
"Although no one yet knows for sure why females show these preferences, a woman with a great dad may choose a similar-looking mate in the hopes that he will also be a good father," speculated the team.