There may be a profound reason behind the appearance

On April 15, 2022, the first day of the California Coachella Music Festival, live music fans dressed in fashion and attracted everyone's attention. (Visual China/Photo)

What's the use of looking good? On different occasions, people's attention and discussion of appearance is creating appearance anxiety and hitting the self-confidence of many people.

Recently, a study in the United States has taken the role of looking at faces out of everyday aesthetics for a deeper and more practical reason. After behavioral experiments and biological metrics, the researchers found that there may indeed be some kind of association between physical attractiveness and health indicators such as immune function.

The experiment found that in biological samples of those whose appearance was evaluated as attractive, E. coli had a higher phagocytosis rate, a lower neuter white blood cell count, and stronger natural killer cell activity. Specific white blood cells, such as neutral white blood cells, can engulf foreign bacteria, and higher rates of phagocytosis and the growth of fewer plasma bacteria suggest that these people may have stronger immunity to bacteria. Natural killer cells are also an important immune cell, which can have a non-specific killing ability for tumor cells, virus-infected cells, etc. Studies have found that men with stronger natural killer cells look more attractive to women. Similarly, men with lower tumor necrosis factor were more attractive. Some of the situations for women are different. The study was published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B in February 2022.

"I think basically everyone is told that if you are too attractive, you will make yourself look very superficial. But these results suggest that when we care about the physical attractiveness of a romantic relationship partner, we may actually care not only about our appearance, but also about helping us pick a healthy partner! Summer Mengelkoch, an experimental social psychology researcher at Texas Christian University, a major participant in the study, told Southern Weekend that scientists have long had many such assumptions about good immune function, but no one has directly tested this hypothesis and found supporting evidence. Lifespan replaces immune function, and it has been inconclusive. Instead, the latest study found some relationships between the two, which not only showed that people with higher immunity would be more attractive, but also showed that they might find that those who could effectively manage the threat of bacteria would be more attractive, "I find this very interesting, and I plan to follow up on this issue in future work."

So what exactly did the researchers do in this latest experiment that has already been completed? How did you come to this conclusion? They first recruited 159 people, a considerable number of people are college students, of which the proportion of men and women is basically the same, in order to avoid other unrelated factors to interfere with the experiment as much as possible, the screening conditions are more stringent, for example, can not be obese, can not have a recent emergency, can not have chronic disease history, depression and other diseases, participate in the experiment two days before drinking and exercise. After entering the experimental procedure, participants were first asked to remove their makeup and take plain photos of the upper part of their neck, which would then be used as visual material to evaluate physical attractiveness. The researchers also gave participants blood draws to do a variety of biological experiments to fully understand their immune function, do questionnaires to understand their age, ethnicity and other personal conditions, whether they smoke, exercise and other habits, as well as the overall health status, family members' health status, and self-perceived spouse value.

After all these preparations were done, the researchers invited nearly 500 people to rate the appearance of those who had just taken photos online, mainly to see if the looks were attractive. And the demographic data of this nearly 500 people must of course also be investigated. Subsequently, health data such as appearance attractiveness data and immune indicators were analyzed, and it was found that there was indeed a certain link between attraction and blood-like antibacterial immune indicators, and some of the links were also affected by gender.

Previous evidence has shown that the predictable characteristics of whether men are attractive are masculinity, symmetry, etc., whether women are attractive depends on femininity, and regardless of gender, obesity generally negatively affects a person's attractiveness. In 2017, researchers at the Centre for Evolutionary Biology at the University of Western Australia used physical attractiveness as a predictor to verify some health indicators. They found that a person's sperm quality could be seen by looking at external masculinity, but few women found any predictive power of physical attractiveness for health. Earlier, in 2003, a study in Evolution and Human Behavior asked undergraduates to evaluate the physical attractiveness and perceived health of high school students in the 1920s to verify their later lifespan, and the results showed that physical attractiveness had predictive power over lifespan, but perceived health status could not predict longevity. Behind these seemingly incredible, but in fact extremely difficult theoretical explorations, scientists actually hope to dig out more secrets of human sexual selection.

"I don't think a face is attractive because it has any inherent attraction, but because the human perceptual system has been designed to find certain features more attractive than others." Throughout evolutionary history, the traits we find attractive are the same traits that gave our ancestors the advantage of mating and survival. In this case, I think that choosing a spouse with high-quality immune genes is exactly what can give our ancestors such a big mating and survival advantage, which makes them more resistant to facing disease and can pass on these excellent immune genes to their children and grandchildren. Summer Mengerkoch told Southern Weekend reporters that when understanding today's mate selection behavior, only focus on some direct reasons, such as a better looking face, more similar to yourself or think that the other party is more like a good parent, and ignore why and how people in evolutionary history form such mate preferences, which is a bit short-sighted, "Ignoring evolutionary history is like just by observing the output of software to understand how a computer works, and does not consider how it was developed and developed to do. And how the hardware is updated over time. ”

Although the specific mechanism behind the relationship between physical attraction and immunity that has been observed so far remains unclear, Summer Mengerkoch believes that this is likely to be the result of human evolution, identifying objects with greater potential viability through mate selection through appearance traits in primitive environments, and we now have such a perception system that can capture clues of immune function from other people's faces.

However, it should be noted that although the latest research has indeed found some relationships between physical attractiveness and immune function, providing a reference for further exploration of this theoretical problem, there are still many limitations, such as small sample size, single type, and basically relatively healthy young college students. And given the many conflicts in the conclusions of relevant studies, the relationships found in the latest research are still relatively rare, and these results should be treated with caution to avoid overextension, and it is not appropriate to directly apply them to specific individuals. More research is needed in the future to continue to validate the relationship.

Southern Weekend reporter Wang Jiangtao