Based on functional imaging of beauty appreciation in art and of beautiful faces, a heuristic model is presented that proposes that beauty appreciation in art is based on a sexual selection mechanism that led to the preference of beautiful faces. Beauty is linked to sexual selection as a sign of fitness. Beautiful traits, like the peacock's tail, are costly and thereby signal superior genetic quality. Mechanistically, beauty is a construct of the brain that links positive feedback of the reward system with hedonic experience, namely pleasure, which itself might be encoded in the orbito-frontal cortex. The context determines whether a stimulus should lead to further approach or withdrawal in order to maintain a hedonic homeostasis. The fact that aesthetic appreciation of art uses the same circuitry as the aesthetic appreciation of faces suggests that there is no special art circuitry in the brain, but that available networks are used for aesthetic appreciation of art.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 10. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 11 January 2014.
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#5,030,104
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Outputs from Perspectives in Biology & Medicine
#163
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Outputs of similar age
#37,114
of 240,347 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Perspectives in Biology & Medicine
#3
of 7 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,360,889 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 85th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 866 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 12.0. This one has done well, scoring higher than 81% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 7 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has scored higher than 4 of them.
