Dr Jeanne Bovet

Assistant Professor

School: Psychology

Dr. Jeanne Bovet is a behavioural scientist, using an evolutionary approach and methods from different fields (including psychology, biology, and economics) to understand human behavior. She obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Montpellier (France), was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (France), and a lecturer at Stony Brook University (New York, USA). Jeanne joined Northumbria University in the Department of Psychology in June 2020 as a senior lecturer.

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Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

I try to understand how evolution shaped our preferences, and what its consequences are in our contemporary lives. My main area of expertise is the perception of faces and bodies.

My work has covered various topics such as parent-offspring conflict over mate choice, variation in female beauty standards through history, sexual selection on age at menopause, the developmental origins of economic preferences, and mate preferences for homogamy in facial features.

I mix various methods and academic fields. For example, I use eye-tracking techniques, laboratory-based and online experiments, geometric morphometric analyses, image manipulation of faces, artworks datasets, and fieldwork in China.

My co-authors come from biology, economics, psychology, marketing, and anthropology.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Perceived Waist-to-Hip Ratio Predicts Attractiveness, Age, and Parity Judgments in Pre-Contemporary European Portraits of Clothed Women, Bovet, J., Truchard, V., Touzeau, C., Chevallier, C., Baumard, N. 1 May 2026, In: Archives of Sexual Behavior
An Index of Her Own: An Investigation of the Proportion of Women Indexed in Evolutionary Psychology Textbooks, Pollet, T., Bovet, J., Renner, E., Barrett, L. 13 Nov 2025, In: Human Ethology
Sample characteristics for quantitative analyses in Body Image: Issues of generalisability, Pollet, T., Bovet, J., Buhaenko, R., Cornelissen, P., Tovee, M. 1 Jun 2024, In: Body Image
What Do Parents Want? Parental Spousal Preferences in China, Raiber, E., Ren, W., Bovet, J., Seabright, P., Wang, C. Apr 2023, In: Economic Development and Cultural Change
Men say “I love you” before women do: Robust across several countries, Watkins, C., Bovet, J., Fernandez, A., Leongómez, J., Żelaźniewicz, A., Corrêa Varella, M., Wagstaff, D. 1 Jun 2022, In: Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
Methodological issues when using face prototypes: A case study on the Faceaurus dataset, Bovet, J., Tognetti, A., Pollet, T. 28 Oct 2022, In: Evolutionary Human Sciences
Do sex hormones at birth predict later-life economic preferences?: Evidence from a pregnancy birth cohort study, van Leeuwen, B., Smeets, P., Bovet, J., Nave, G., Stieglitz, J., Whitehouse, A. 23 Dec 2020, In: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Comparing theory-driven and data-driven attractiveness models using images of real women's faces, Holzleitner, I., Lee, A., Hahn, A., Kandrik, M., Bovet, J., Renoult, J., Simmons, D., Garrod, O., DeBruine, L., Jones, B. 1 Dec 2019, In: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance
Evolutionary theories and men's preferences for women's waist-to-hip ratio: Which hypotheses remain? A systematic review, Bovet, J. 4 Jun 2019, In: Frontiers in Psychology
National income inequality predicts cultural variation in mouth to mouth kissing, Watkins, C., Leongómez, J., Bovet, J., Żelaźniewicz, A., Korbmacher, M., Varella, M., Fernandez, A., Wagstaff, D., Bolgan, S. 1 Dec 2019, In: Scientific Reports