New research published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living provides insights into the biomechanical strategies used by women to enhance the perceived attractiveness of their gait. The findings suggest that changes in energy, flexibility, and body movements can convey information about femininity, health, and youth. The study contributes to our understanding of how human movement is related to physical attractiveness.
Previous studies have shown that factors like gait kinematics, lumbar curvature, and stride length affect attractiveness. However, most of these studies focused on the observer’s perspective, and little attention was given to the actor’s viewpoint and their intentional strategies to increase perceived attractiveness.
“When I was a child, I learned classical ballet and experienced the difficulty of moving people’s hearts through physical expression. Therefore, I started my research with the desire to clarify the beauty of human movement,” explained study author Hiroko Tanabe, an assistant professor at the Institute of Innovation for Future Society at Nagoya University.
“Even in everyday life, the impression of a person changes greatly depending on their behavior, such as the way they walk, sit, or stand. Looking at previous research, there has been a lot of research on what kind of movement is attractive, but there has been no analysis from the perspective of how to create attractive movements. These are the reasons why I conducted this research.”
To conduct the study, the researchers recruited 17 healthy women, including professional fashion models and non-models. The participants walked on a treadmill under two conditions: a normal condition and an attractive-conscious condition. In the normal condition, they were asked to walk casually while thinking about things unrelated to their walking motion. In the attractive-conscious condition, they were instructed to walk as attractively as possible based on their own perception.
Tanabe and her colleagues used a three-dimensional optical motion capture system to obtain joint motion data during the walking trials. They placed reflective markers on specific body points of the participants and recorded their movements. The motion data was then analyzed to extract various parameters related to gait attractiveness.
The researchers focused on factors such as the energy of each body segment, flexibility of the upper body, and limb silhouettes to assess their roles in projecting an attractive gait. They hypothesized that consciousness of gait attractiveness would lead to emphasizing certain body parts (such as the bosom and buttocks) associated with fertility and youth. They calculated joint angles, joint energy, upper body flexibility, and limb silhouettes to analyze the participants’ movements.
To validate the perception of attractiveness, the researchers created gait animations from the joint motion data and had 60 subjects evaluate the attractiveness of the gaits on a 7-point Likert scale.
The researchers found that both non-models and fashion models received higher attractiveness scores when they exhibited an attractive-conscious gait compared to a normal gait.
“We not only evaluate the attractiveness of others based on their physical movements (as has been said in previous research), but we also manipulate the attractiveness evaluations of others by changing our own movements,” Tanabe told PsyPost. “In other words, even if you don’t have training like a model walking, if you try to walk attractively, you will look attractive to others. In such nonverbal communication through the attractiveness of female walking, information related to femininity, health, and youth is conveyed.”
The results indicated that women, particularly non-models, expressed attractiveness in their gait by increasing energy at specific joints and increasing flexibility. Fashion models also used similar strategies but emphasized knee stretching and backward arm movement.
Specifically, non-models increased energy at the hip and thoracolumbar joints and showed greater flexibility when walking attractively. Fashion models, on the other hand, emphasized swinging their upper arms backward and extended their knees during the push-off phase.
(A fashion model’s gait from the study. Normal condition on the left, attractive-conscious condition on the right.)
The women in the study also tended to face forward and tilt their heads downward, which is typically associated with expressions of sadness or submission. It remains unclear whether these movements have adaptive benefits or are socially and culturally perceived as attractive in women.
“It was observed that one of the strategies women use to express an attractive gait was forward head tilt (posture with the chin pulled back),” Tanabe said. “I found this result very interesting. Forward head tilt is said to be associated with emotional expressions of sadness and defensive posture; there may be some connection between emotions and states of mind and attractiveness. Japan has a culture that finds beauty in modest and ambiguous expressions, so it may be that this kind of restrained expression and attractiveness are connected. (All the people participated in this study were Japanese.)”
The study, “Biomechanical strategies to maximize gait attractiveness among women“, was authored by Hiroko Tanabe, Keisuke Fujii, Naotsugu Kaneko, Hikaru Yokoyama, and Kimitaka Nakazawa.
