What flowers do we like? The influence of shape and color on the rating of flower beauty
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Psychiatry and Psychology
- Keywords
- People-plant interactions, Beauty, Aesthetic preference, Floral morphology, Evolutionary aesthetics, Phytophilia
- Copyright
- © 2016 Hůla et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. What flowers do we like? The influence of shape and color on the rating of flower beauty. PeerJ PrePrints 4:e1772v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1772v1
Abstract
There is no doubt that people find flowers beautiful. Surprisingly, we know very little about the actual properties which make flowers so appealing to humans. Although the evolutionary aesthetics provides some theories concerning generally preferred flower traits, empirical evidence is largely missing. In this study, we used an online survey in which residents of the Czech Republic (n = 2006) rated the perceived beauty of 52 flower stimuli of diverse shapes and colors. Colored flowers were preferred over their uncolored versions. When controlling for flower shape, we found an unequal preference for different flower colors, blue being the most and yellow the least preferred. In the overall assessment of beauty, shape was more important than color. Prototypical flowers, i.e., radially symmetrical flowers with low complexity, were rated as the most beautiful. We also found a positive effect of sharp flower contours and blue color on the overall rating of flower beauty. The results may serve as a basis for further studies in some areas of the people-plant interaction research.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints. The paper is currently submitted to PeerJ.