Researchers have found that happiness for city women is quite dependent upon physical appearance. But in the country, looks don’t count for much in terms of overall life satisfaction and happiness, according to the new study by Plaut in the journal Personal Relationships.

“City women who were the most attractive got a lot of bang for their appearance buck,” says the study’s lead author, “and if you were even slightly below average, you were very clearly worse off.”

For women living in the country, there was no connection between physical appearance and happiness. Interestingly there was a slight trend in the data for women in the country to be happier if they were chubbier.

For the new study, Plaut and her colleagues interviewed 257 women who lived in the city and 330 from the country. The women were asked to rate their satisfaction with life, their connectedness with friends and community, and their general level of happiness. For a measure of satisfaction, they were asked to rate their lives on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “worst possible life you can imagine” and 10 listed as the “best possible life you can imagine.”

To get a sense of the women’s attractiveness, researchers asked for waist and hip measurements. Other studies have shown that the ratio of waist to hips is a reliable indicator of attractiveness, Plaut explains. The lower the ratio, the slimmer the waist — and the more attractive a woman is considered to be.

Financial and social pressure in the cities is higher for attractiveness contributing to more stress compared with countryside, where the life is more stable. Part of that stability could be emerging from a sense of acceptance that comes from living with people and friends you might have known since elementary school. Fewer people and less unfamiliar faces could be adding to the comfort and happiness quotient. While living in the city, where indviduals are surrounded by so many unknown faces, people might feel the pressure to be cool to fit in.

First impressions:
The new findings fall in line with other research, says Michael Cunningham, a psychologist and professor in the department of communications at the University of Louisville, Ky. “In competitive and individualistic cultures you have to compete for limited social attention,” Cunningham says. “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 other longer-term variables have a bigger impact on your well-being. As a consequence, physical attractiveness doesn’t have as big an impact.”

There’s another way to look at it, argues Dr. Alan Manevitz, a psychiatrist at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. People aren’t obsessed with appearance in rural areas simply because the population is too small for there to be much choice.

“If you’re living on a small island and there are 10 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,” he adds. “As soon as you begin to have more people you have more competition and then physical appearance becomes more important.”

Avice Hoff, executive director of the Miss Montana Scholarship and member of the Montana 4-H Hall of Fame, knows a lot about competition, and she thinks that's got nothing to do with it. Rather, true beauty can't be captured by something as simplistic as a waist-to-hip ratio. "Montana women look at other qualities in a person rather than external beauty," she says.

The researchers haven't yet looked at how all this plays out in the suburbs. But Plaut suspects that the character of each community has a lot to do with it. In other words, looks are likely to matter a lot more in Pasadena than Peoria.