Baby got back (vowel)

Given two otherwise equally attractive women--one named Susan, the other named Suzanne--Susan would generally be found to be slightly more attractive according to the research of Amy Perfors, grad student in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She can tell you about it herself at her website, or you can just stay here and let me tell you about it.

Perfors submitted multiple copies of the same photos of her friends but under several different names to www.hotornot.com and she found a small but statistically significant effect in the names. Males with a stressed front vowel in their first name tend to be "hotter" than those with with stressed back vowels. For women, it was the other way around, with the stressed back vowels, like the -u- in Susan, being preferable to the stressed front vowels, like the -a- in Suzanne.