Dr. Avnish Jolly,29 Sep :According to study carried out by team of researchers at Wroclaw University, Poland that men actually find women’s bodies more attractive in the winter and a revelation they claim might have an impact on mate choice and on levels of adultery. According to researchers, though there is no clear explanation for the seasonal variation, one theory can be that fewer female bodies are on display in winter and so the rarity makes them more attractive.
It is hard to believe but a new study has claimed that women’s bare flesh in winter is a bigger turn-on for men and in fact, they came to the conclusion after carrying out an experiment on 114 men who were asked to rate photos of women at different times of the year. The participants were shown snaps every three months over a period of five seasons. Three kinds of photographs were shown to the subjects — full body portraits of women in black swimsuits, exposed breasts of different sizes, and faces of young women.
Results revealed that bodies and breasts were rated most attractive in autumn and winter, and least attractive in summer. But there’s no seasonal variation in ratings for faces — which the team members believe may be because women’s faces are on view all year round. Subsequently, the researchers tested how attractive the subjects found their own partner — the results showed the same seasonal pattern, with a peak in autumn and winter.
Since in summer men are much more often exposed to more uncovered women’s bodies than in winter, our prediction was that stimuli presented to men in summer will be assessed as less attractive than the same stimuli presented to the same men in winter. As predicted, ratings of body and breast attractiveness were lower in summer than winter. This effect might also contribute to observed behavioral fluctuations related to human male-female interactions.
According to researchers the effect we found might cause seasonally different levels of male assessment of female attractiveness or affect males’ mate choice decisions. It is also possible that such seasonality might be related to some fluctuations in sexual activity and therefore might be related, for example, to some yearly fluctuations of adulterous behavior.
These findings have been published in the latest edition of the ‘Perception’ Journal.