For Country Gals, Beauty Is Only Skin Deep

This is interesting.

A new study shows that good looks can afford women happiness if they live in a city, but for country gals, physical appearance has a lot less weight when it comes to overall happiness.

The study’s lead, Victoria Plaut, visiting assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkley School of Law, and assistant professor at the University of Georgia, said, “City women who were the most attractive got a lot of bang for their appearance buck. And if you were even slightly below average, you were very clearly worse off.”

Conversely, for country gals, physical appearance had seemingly no connection to happines, and in fact, there was a slight trend in data which showed that chubbier country women were happier than their thin counterparts.

For the study, Plaut and her team interviewed 257 women who lived in the city, and 330 from the country. Each woman was aksed to rate their happiness based on overall satisfaction, their relationships with their friends and community, and their general level of joy on a scale of 1 to 10. As far as measuring a woman’s attractiveness, researchers took each woman’s waist and hip measurements. Previous studies have shown that the waist to hip ratio is a reliable indication of how attractive the woman is.

The new study backs other prior research according to Michael Cunningham, psychologist and professor at the University of Louisville. He says, “In competitive and individualistic cultures you have to compete for limited social attention. Physical attractiveness is one of the variables that gets you social attention and other positive outcomes. But in communal cultures and rural areas, family reputation and longer-term variables have a bigger impact on your well-being. As a consequence, physical attractiveness doesn’t have as big an impact.”

Dr. Alan Manevitz, psychiatrist at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, adds that country towns have fewer people, making physical appearance less relevant. “If you’re living on a small island and there are ten people on that island, and one person fishes and another grows vegetables and another chops down trees, it doesn’t matter what anyone looks like. As soon as you begin to have more people you have more competition and then physical appearance becomes more important.”

This is all very interesting. We do have to question how bullet-proof the waist-to-hip ratio method is – we’re sure that can’t be a completely accurate way to judge one’s overall appearance. Regardless – pretty interesting!

What do you think – do you find this rings true in your life??

[Image via AP Images.]