WHEN it comes to choosing our partners it has long been assumed that men go for looks, while women are more interested in personality.

However, it seems that Freud may not have been barking up the wrong tree after all with his Oedipus complex. A study published this week suggests that men are drawn to women who look like their mothers, while women are attracted to men who resemble their fathers.

The findings provide further evidence to support what psychologists call sexual imprinting – the idea that the kinds of faces we find appealing as adults are linked to our early childhood experiences.

In the study, carried out in Hungary, a team of psychologists measured people's faces and compared them with their partner's parents and strangers. They found that men were more likely to pair up with women whose bone structure was similar to their own mothers, with a similar effect influencing women's choice
of men.

Celebrities such as Zoe Ball and Norman Cook, who bears certain similarities to her father Johnny Ball, and Lisa Marie Presley, whose former husband Nicolas Cage has a more than passing resemblance to Elvis Presley, appear to support the theory. There are, of course, numerous variables that come into play when we choose a partner, but what does this new research tell us about how attraction works? Dr Lisa Matthewman, a chartered psychologist and life coach, says it is the latest step in an ongoing area of research. "We are programmed from an early age to go for partners who have a physical resemblance to our parents. So, for instance, if a boy's mother was a curvy size 16 then that may be the kind of woman he will find attractive in adulthood," she says

"But as well as being biologically programmed there are also social and environmental factors, like fashions and media images, that exist which aren't fixed, and all these things compliment each other."

Interestingly, though, the sexual imprinting link is often lost in cases where women don't have good relationships with their fathers. While previous research has shown that women use their fathers as a template for choosing a mate even if they have been adopted, suggesting that imprinting is led by experience and not simply by
our genes.

Dr Lynda Boothroyd, a psychologist at Durham University, carried out similar research published last year and says the latest study reinforces her own findings. "People are attracted to faces that have similar proportions to those of their parents, so they choose people that physically resemble their opposite sex parent.

"The slight difference for women is this facial similarity has something to do with the centre of the face, while with men it is more to do with the lower part of the face and we don't know why that is, because it seems quite odd," she says.

Although this link exists there is a balance between the benefits of marrying someone genetically close and the risks of in-breeding. "Our brains are geared to avoid choosing someone who looks too similar to us, like an immediate family member.

"But at the same time there is a strong tendency for a certain amount of similarity, so women whose dads have big noses might be more attracted to someone who also has a big nose."

Physical attraction is just one, albeit important, factor in determining who we choose as our partners. "If you ask men and women what they want from a partner, although there are similarities, men focus more on looks, while women focus more on what job someone has and how generous they are.

"Women tend to be more demanding in terms of personality and resources and men go for looks and sexual fidelity, but this is something we've known for decades," she says.

But Dr Boothroyd believes the latest findings are a stepping stone towards understanding why we behave the way we do. "What's interesting is that both men and women seem to be learning what faces look like and what they find attractive from their parents.

"Babies focus on faces almost from the minute they are born and they learn what a face
looks like from those they see around them and the ones they see the most are their parents," she says.

"We know that this happens but we don't know much about exactly how it happens, so that's the next big question."