A new study has claimed that girls who tend to be closer to their fathers are most likely to choose men who look like their fathers, while boys who are closer to their mums, tend to choose women who resemble their mothers too.

The researchers have recently found out that this trait get inhibited in the genes itself. The matching of someone’s facial features to one’s opposite sex parent and to choose him or her as life partner is called “sexual imprinting.”

The lead researcher Tamas Bereczkei, reported to media, “Our results support the sexual imprinting hypothesis which states that children shape a mental template of their opposite-sex parents and search for a partner who resembles that perception. They build up an image of their parents' appearance, and probably their behavior, and search for a partner who resembles that mental representation.”

After the analysis of photographs of the faces of the members of 52 families, Bereczkei and colleagues at University of Pecs arrived on this conclusion. They found out that women were more attracted to men that had somewhat similar appearance as that of their fathers, particularly the in terms of nose and jaw shape and size. On the other hand, men were more fascinated by women who resembled their mothers. These recent findings have given more evidence in regard to the process of sexual imprinting.

Some others feel that sexual imprinting is not the process related to genes but is led by experience. They illustrated the example of adopted girls, who use their fathers as templates to pick up a mate. However, it was also found that women, who did not have friendly relations with their fathers, didn’t have the trait of “sexual-imprinting.”