Men marry Mom-lookalike, women do same with Dad-twin

William Atkins
Saturday, 06 September 2008 23:17

Science - Biology

A Hungarian study finds that men usually select a life partner who looks like their mother, and women commonly pick a mate that looks like their father.


The report concludes that heterosexual men and women are more likely to select a mate whose faces are similar to their “opposite-sex” parent. The researchers state that this mate-selecting process is deeply entrenched in biological processes that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.

The article “Facial metric similarities mediate mate chose: sexual imprinting on opposite-sex partners” was published on Tuesday, September 2, 2008, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Its authors are psychologists Tamas Bereczkei, Gabor Hededus, and Gabor Hejnal, all from the Institute of Psychology, University of Pécs, (Pécs, Hungary).

Their research is based on past studies that have shown that preferences on the selection of mates are influenced on “imprinting-like” processes.

The researchers used fourteen facial proportions, such as width of jaw, shape of lips, and distance between brow and mouth, on 312 Hungarian adults within 52 families, where each family included one couple and two sets of parents. They made a model based on these fourteen facial zones.

They then correlated these 14 facial features and compared them between family members and randomly selected pairs of the general population.

The results follow on page two.