Attractiveness of Own-Race, Other-Race, and Mixed-Race Faces

The effect of animated Sci-Fi characters' racial presentation on narrative engagement, wishful identification, and physical activity intention among children

Characters play an integral role in animated narratives, but their visual racial presentation has received limited attention. A diverse group of U.S. children watched a 15-min physical activity-promoting animated Sci-Fi narrative. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions, which varied the lead characters' racial presentation: realistic racially unambiguous (Original: White children, Black mother), realistic racially ambiguous (Ambiguous: All with brown skin without specified race/ethnicity), and fantastical racially ambiguous (Fantastical: All with brown skin with fantastical hair-and-eye color schemes). We assessed narrative engagement, wishful identification, and physical activity intention. Controlling for social desirability and multigroup ethnic identity, children who watched Fantastical characters showed significantly higher narrative engagement than those who watched Original characters, but they did not statistically differ from those who watched Ambiguous characters. Structural equation modeling indicated that narrative engagement and wishful identification fully mediated the racial representation effect (Fantastical vs. Original) on physical activity intention.

The speed of race

When asked to categorize faces according to 'race', people typically categorize other-race faces faster than faces belonging to their own race. This 'Other Race Categorization Advantage' is thought to reflect enhanced sensitivity to early visual signals characteristic of other-race faces, and can manifest within 200 ms of face presentation. However, recent research has highlighted the importance of signal intensity in this effect, where visual-degradation of the face images significantly enhances the effect and exposes a behavioural threshold at very low levels of visual quality where other-race visual signals are able to be perceived while same-race signals are not. The current study investigated the effect of signal intensity in race categorization processes in the brain through electroencephalography and in accuracy/reaction times. While replicating the previously observed enhancement of the other-race categorization advantage, we also found enhanced sensitivity to other-race faces in early P1 peaks, as well as later N170 and N250 peaks. These effects, however, related to the varying levels of signal intensity in the face stimuli, suggesting that race categorization may involve different types of perceptual and neural processes rather than one discrete process. The speed at which race is perceived depends on the intensity of the face signal.

Effects of facial skin pigmentation on social judgments in a Mexican population

People quickly and involuntarily form impressions of others based on their facial physical attributes, which can modulate critical social interactions. Skin pigmentation is one of the most variable and conspicuous facial traits among human populations. Empirical evidence suggests that these variations reflect ancestral ecological selective pressures balancing cutaneous vitamin D synthesis with the protection of the dermis from ultraviolet radiation. Nevertheless, skin pigmentation may currently be subject to additional selective pressures. For instance, the colonial era in Central and South America developed a highly stratified society based on ethnic origins, and light skin pigmentation became associated with higher social status and deference. This association could have originated through historical social learning that promoted favorable social perceptions towards individuals with lighter skin color and unfavorable perceptions towards individuals with darker skin color, which could still be present in the perception of current populations. Facial skin pigmentation is also sexually dimorphic, with males tending to exhibit darker skin than females, a difference that could be driven by sexual selection. To explore whether social learning and sexual selection represent additional selective pressures on skin pigmentation, we tested how this facial trait influences fundamental social perceptions in a Mexican population (N = 700, 489 female). We sampled facial images of eight European American males with natural lighter facial skin and eight males from an indigenous pre-Columbian community from Mexico, the Me'Phaa, with natural darker facial skin. We produced stimuli from these images by varying the skin pigmentation while preserving the facial shape. Stimuli were rated on attractiveness, trustworthiness, perceived health, dominance, aggressiveness, and femininity/masculinity. We found that the natural light-skinned faces were perceived as more attractive, trustworthy, and healthy but less dominant than the natural dark faces. Furthermore, by varying the facial skin color in these original groups, we altered the perceptions of them, mainly their attractiveness. These results partially support the hypothesis that dark facial skin color may help males compete for mates. Also, the results strongly support the view that lighter facial skin color became associated with social benefits through social learning in this Mexican population. Our findings, when viewed through the lens of cultural evolution, align with previous research in social psychology and anthropology. They hold the potential to offer a comprehensive understanding of the origin of this social phenomenon of cultural transmission, which currently plays a role in the formation of racial attitudes, stereotyping, and racial inequality in Mexican and other Latin American populations.

Let's put a smile on that face-A positive facial expression improves aesthetics of portrait photographs

In today's age of social media and smartphones, portraits-such as selfies or pictures of friends and family-are very frequently produced, shared and viewed images. Despite their prevalence, the psychological factors that characterize a 'good' photo-one that people will generally like, keep, and think is especially aesthetically pleasing-are not well understood. Here, we studied how a subtle change in facial expression (smiling) in portraits determines their aesthetic image value (beyond a more positive appearance of the depicted person). We used AI-based image processing tools in a broad set of portrait photographs and generated neutral and slightly smiling versions of the same pictures. Consistent across two experiments, portraits with a subtle smile increased both spontaneous aesthetic preferences in a swiping task as well as improving more explicit aesthetic ratings after prolonged viewing. Participants distinguished between aspects associated with image beauty and the depicted person's attractiveness, resulting in specific interactions between variables related to participant traits, image content, and task. Our study confirms that a subtle-and in this case fully artificial-smile reliably increases the aesthetic quality of portraits, illustrating how current image processing methods can target psychologically important variables and thereby increase the aesthetic value of photographs.

Facial morphometric differences across face databases: influence of ethnicities and sex

The scientific need for standardized, high-quality facial stimuli has driven the creation of several face image databases in recent years. These stimuli are particularly important in facial asymmetry research. However, previous studies have reported facial anthropometric differences across a variety of ethnicities. This highlights the need to investigate whether these differences can also impact the use of face image databases, particularly in facial asymmetry research. In this study, we investigated facial asymmetry-based morphometric differences between the multi-ethnic Chicago Face Database (CFD) and the LACOP Face Database, which is composed of Brazilian subjects. We found reliable differences in facial asymmetry between the two databases, which were related to ethnic groups. Specifically, differences in eye and mouth asymmetry seem to drive these differences. The asymmetry-based morphometric differences among databases and ethnicities found in this study reinforce the necessity of creating multi-ethnic face databases.

Facial typicality and attractiveness reflect an ideal dimension of face structure

Face perception and recognition are important processes for social interaction and communication among humans, so understanding how faces are mentally represented and processed has major implications. At the same time, faces are just some of the many stimuli that we encounter in our everyday lives. Therefore, more general theories of how we represent objects might also apply to faces. Contemporary research on the mental representation of faces has centered on two competing theoretical frameworks that arose from more general categorization research: prototype-based face representation and exemplar-based face representation. Empirically distinguishing between these frameworks is difficult and neither one has been ruled out. In this paper, we advance this area of research in three ways. First, we introduce two additional frameworks for mental representation of categories, varying abstraction and ideal representation, which have not been applied to face perception and recognition before. Second, we fit formal computational models of all four of these theories to human perceptual judgments of the typicality and attractiveness (a strong correlate of typicality) of 100 young adult Caucasian female faces, with the models expressed within a face space derived from facial similarity judgments via multidimensional scaling. Third, we predict the perceived typicality and attractiveness of the faces using these models and compare the predictive performance of each to the empirical data. We found that of all four models, the ideal representation model provided the best account of perceived typicality and attractiveness for the present set of faces, although all models showed discrepancies from the empirical data. These findings demonstrate the relevance of mental categorization processes for representing faces.

A Crowdsourced Evaluation of Facial Averageness and Attractiveness

BACKGROUND

Evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that humans are attracted to individuals who possess average anatomy for the population.

OBJECTIVES

The aim of this study was to prove that a composite of average facial features would be more attractive to raters than the cohort utilized to create the composite.

METHODS

The male and female cohorts each consisted of 41 standardized frontal-view monochrome photographs, with 1 composite image derived from the other 40 real images. Amazon Mechanical Turk, a widely used crowdsourcing platform, was utilized to obtain ratings of images ranging from 1 to 7, with 1 and 7 being least and most attractive, respectively. The strength of the preference for the composite over the real images was assessed by the difference between the mean rating of the composite and real images.

RESULTS

In total, 870 and 876 respondents were recruited to rate the male and female cohorts, respectively. For the male and female cohorts, the composite image was rated significantly higher than the rest of the cohort overall and across all ages, genders, and countries of residence (all P < 0.0001). For both cohorts, the strength of the preference was significantly higher for European respondents and lower for South American and nonbinary respondents (all P < 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

This study reveals that average facial anatomy is perceived as most attractive across all demographics, a finding that is hoped to serve as a stepping stone for further studies leading to objective cosmetic quantifications and integrating evidence-based medicine into aesthetic surgery.

The Compositionality of Facial Expressions

The principle of compositionality, an important postulation in language and cognition research, posits that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meaning of its constituting parts and the operation performed on those parts. Here, we provide strong evidence that this principle plays a significant role also in interpreting facial expressions. In three studies in which perceivers interpreted sequences of two emotional facial expression images, we show that the composite meaning of facial expressions results from the meaning of its constituting expressions and an algebraic operation performed on those expressions. Our study offers a systematic account as to how the meaning of facial expressions (single and sequences) are being formed and perceived. In a broader context, our results raise the possibility that the principle of compositionality may apply to human communication modalities beyond spoken language, whereby a minimal number of components are expanded to a much greater number of meanings.

Cross-cultural evidence of a space-ethnicity association in face categorisation

According to a space-valence association, individuals tend to relate negatively- and positively-connoted stimuli with the left and right side of space, respectively. So far, only a few studies have explored whether this phenomenon can also emerge for social dimensions associated with facial stimuli. Here, we adopted a cross-cultural approach and conducted two experiments with the main aim to test whether a left–right space-valence association can also emerge for other- vs. own-race faces. Asian Japanese (Experiment 1) and White Italian (Experiment 2) participants engaged in a speeded binary classification task in which a central placed face had to be classified as either Asian or White. Manual responses were provided through a left- vs. right-side button. In both experiments, other-race faces elicited faster responses than own-race faces, in line with the well-documented other-race categorisation advantage. Moreover, evidence of an association between space and ethnic membership also arose and, interestingly, was similar in both groups. Indeed, Asian faces were responded to faster with the right-side key than with the left-side key, whereas response side had no effect for White faces. These results are discussed with regard to possible cross-cultural differences in group perception.

The effect of implicit racial bias on recognition of other-race faces

Previous research has established a possible link between recognition performance, individuation experience, and implicit racial bias of other-race faces. However, it remains unclear how implicit racial bias might influence other-race face processing in observers with relatively extensive experience with the other race. Here we examined how recognition of other-race faces might be modulated by observers’ implicit racial bias, in addition to the effects of experience and face recognition ability. Caucasian participants in a culturally diverse city completed a memory task for Asian and Caucasian faces, an implicit association test, a questionnaire assessing experience with Asians and Caucasians, and a face recognition ability test. As expected, recognition performance for Asian faces was positively predicted by increased face recognition ability, and experience with Asians. More importantly, it was also negatively predicted by increased positive bias towards Asians, which was modulated by an interaction between face recognition ability and implicit bias, with the effect of implicit bias observed predominantly in observers with high face recognition ability. Moreover, the positions of the first two fixations when participants learned the other-race faces were affected by different factors, with the first fixation modulated by the effect of experience and the second fixation modulated by the interaction between implicit bias and face recognition ability. Taken together, these findings suggest the complexity in understanding the perceptual and socio-cognitive influences on the other-race effect, and that observers with high face recognition ability may more likely evaluate racial features involuntarily when recognizing other-race faces.

Surgical Versus Nonsurgical Lower Face Contouring: Layperson Perceptions of Attractiveness and Personality Traits

BACKGROUND

Traditional approaches to lower face contouring involve ostectomy of the mandibular angle or body. More recently, nonsurgical techniques have gained popularity, including neurotoxin injection to the masseter muscle. This study aims to evaluate layperson perceptions of patient attractiveness and personality traits following lower face contouring using either surgical or nonsurgical treatment.

METHODS

In this survey study distributed via Amazon's Mechanical Turk, respondents viewed a series of 14 patient images obtained in clinic before and after surgical or nonsurgical jawline slimming, or without any facial aesthetic procedure. Respondents rated changes in attractiveness and personality trait scores between the before and after image (score: -50 to 50, with 50 representing the greatest posttreatment increase and 0 representing no change). We used descriptive statistics and multivariable regression to determine differences in respondent ratings between patient images.

RESULTS

A total of 415 respondents (mean age 38 years, 50.6% female) successfully completed the survey. Compared to patients who underwent nonsurgical treatment, those who received surgery had significantly greater increases in perceived attractiveness (P < 0.001), femininity (P < 0.001), friendliness (P < 0.001), intelligence (P < 0.001), trustworthiness (P < 0.001), financial wealthiness (P < 0.001), dominance (P < 0.01), and self-esteem (P < 0.001). Gonial angles increased and jaw widths decreased following both surgical and nonsurgical intervention, with no statistically significant difference between treatment groups.

CONCLUSIONS

From the layperson perspective, surgical compared to nonsurgical jawline contouring offers greater improvements in perceptions of attractiveness and favorable personality traits.

Gender, Generation, and Multiracial Identification in the United States

Multiracial self-identification is frequently portrayed as a disproportionately female tendency, but previous research has not probed the conditions under which this relationship might occur. Using the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracial Adults, we offer a more comprehensive analysis that considers gender differences at two distinct stages: reporting multiple races in one's ancestry and selecting multiple races to describe oneself. We also examine self-identification patterns by the generational locus of multiracial ancestry. We find that females are more likely to be aware of multiracial ancestry overall, but only first-generation females are more likely than their male counterparts to self-identify as multiracial. Finally, we explore the role of racial ancestry combination, finding that multiracial awareness and self-identification are likely gendered differently for different segments of the mixed-race population. This offers a more nuanced picture of how gender interacts with other social processes to shape racial identification in the United States.

Social and affective neuroscience: an Australian perspective

While research in social and affective neuroscience has a long history, it is only in the last few decades that it has been truly established as an independent field of investigation. In the Australian region, despite having an even shorter history, this field of research is experiencing a dramatic rise. In this review, we present recent findings from a survey conducted on behalf of the Australasian Society for Social and Affective Neuroscience (AS4SAN) and from an analysis of the field to highlight contributions and strengths from our region (with a focus on Australia). Our results demonstrate that researchers in this field draw on a broad range of techniques, with the most common being behavioural experiments and neuropsychological assessment, as well as structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging. The Australian region has a particular strength in clinically driven research, evidenced by the types of populations under investigation, top cited papers from the region, and funding sources. We propose that the Australian region has potential to contribute to cross-cultural research and facilitating data sharing, and that improved links with international leaders will continue to strengthen this burgeoning field.

Public Perception of a Normal Head Shape in Children With Sagittal Craniosynostosis

: A question that remains unanswered is at what level of surgical correction does the public perceive a head shape to be "normal" or "acceptable?" For most cases of non-syndromic asymptomatic craniosynostosis, the parents desire for surgical correction is to improve the cosmetic appearance of head shape. At the time of this writing, the intraoperative surgeons' perspective of what constitutes an acceptable head shape is the target for surgical correction. In introducing an improved objectively cosmetic goal, an appropriate outcome measure would be to assess what the general public considers a normal or acceptable head shape in children with craniosynostosis.

METHOD

Twenty-two unique images were presented via an online crowdsourcing survey of a severe case of non-syndromic sagittal craniosynosis gradually corrected to an age and gender matched normalized head shape. Participants were recruited via the Sick Kids Twitter account. Participants were invited to rate the head shapes as "normal" or "abnormal."

RESULTS

The 538 participants completed the online survey. Participants were able to reliably and consistently identify normal and abnormal head shapes with a Kappa Score >0.775. Furthermore, participants indicated that a correction of 70% is required in order for the cranial deformity to be regarded as "normal." This threshold closely reflects a normal Cranial Index, which is a widely used morphometric outcome in craniosynostosis.

CONCLUSION

Crowdsourcing provides an ideal method for capturing the general population's perspective on what constitutes a normal and acceptable head shape in children with sagittal craniosynostosis. Laypersons are able to reliably and consistently distinguish cranial deformities from a "normal" head shape. The public indicates a threshold correction of 70% in sagittal craniosynosis to regard it as a "normal" head shape.

Mating Decisions in the Absence of Physical Attraction

Objective

Mates high in physical attractiveness are in short supply, which means that not all people are able to find mates who are sufficiently attractive. Threshold models of mate preferences suggest that when physical attractiveness minimums are not reached, other traits possessed by a potential partner may play a lesser role in mate choice. However, few studies have sought to understand mating decisions when those minimums are not met.

Methods

In this experiment (N = 186), participants rated images of (pre-rated) unattractive opposite-sex others for long-term and short-term relationships after learning dealbreaker or dealmaker information.

Results

While participants did not find targets highly desirable or physically attractive (as a stimulus check), men were more willing than women to have casual sex, and that men and women reported similar desirability ratings towards long-term partners. Learning dealbreakers was associated with less desire for the targets than dealmakers, but women’s lack of interest was insensitive to mating context, whereas men found the target especially undesirable in the long-term context. Additionally, men were willing to consider a long-term relationship with a physically unattractive partner who possessed dealmakers, but not one who possessed dealbreakers.

Conclusions

Our discussion focuses on men and women’s mating decisions when potential partners fail to meet minimum thresholds for physical attractiveness. Future research is needed to explore the magnitude of the effect of meeting or failing to meet one’s minimum thresholds for physical attractiveness.

Filtered beauty in Oslo and Tokyo: A spatial frequency analysis of facial attractiveness

Images of European female and male faces were digitally processed to generate spatial frequency (SF) filtered images containing only a narrow band of visual information within the Fourier spectrum. The original unfiltered images and four SF filtered images (low, medium-low, medium-high and high) were then paired in trials that kept constant SF band and face gender and participants made a forced-choice decision about the more attractive among the two faces. In this way, we aimed at identifying those specific SF bands where forced-choice preferences corresponded best to forced-choice judgements made when viewing the natural, broadband, facial images. We found that aesthetic preferences dissociated across SFs and face gender, but similarly for participants from Asia (Japan) and Europe (Norway). Specifically, preferences when viewing SF filtered images were best related to the preference with the broadband face images when viewing the highest filtering band for the female faces (about 48-77 cycles per face). In contrast, for the male faces, the medium-low SF band (about 11-19 cpf) related best to choices made with the natural facial images. Eye tracking provided converging evidence for the above, gender-related, SF dissociations. We suggest greater aesthetic relevance of the mobile and communicative parts for the female face and, conversely, of the rigid, structural, parts for the male face for facial aesthetics.

Not Quite Monoracial: Biracial Stereotypes Explored

Stereotypes often guide our perceptions of members of social groups. However, research has yet to document what stereotypes may exist for the fastest growing youth demographic in the United States-biracial individuals. Across seven studies (N = 1,104), we investigate what stereotypes are attributed to various biracial groups, whether biracial individuals are stereotyped as more similar to their lower status monoracial parent group (trait hypodescent), and whether contact moderates these stereotypes. Results provide evidence of some universal biracial stereotypes that are applied to all biracial groups: attractive and not fitting in or belonging. We also find that all biracial groups are attributed a number of unique stereotypes (i.e., which are not associated with their monoracial parent groups). However, across all studies, we find little evidence of trait hypodescent and no evidence that the tendency to engage in trait hypodescent varies as a function of contact.

The effect of sexual selection on phenotypic diversification among human populations: A simulation study

Despite the generally low level of inter-population genetic differentiation in humans as compared with great apes, it has long been acknowledged that there is a considerable amount of geographic variations in human phenotypes, for example, skin pigmentation, cranial morphology, and soft-tissue facial morphology, to name but a few. Indeed, recent studies have suggested that the extent of inter-population diversity in some human phenotypes is greater than expected from random drift alone. Such an excess of phenotypic diversity is often attributed to adaptation to local environment. However, this account is valid only if populations differ in some ecological aspects that elicit differential selection acting on a given phenotypic feature. Another long-standing hypothesis is the sexual selection hypothesis, which claims that phenotypic diversity arises and/or is maintained owing to variations in preference for mating partners. In this paper, we explore the plausibility of the sexual selection hypothesis by means of computer simulations, in which the inter-population diversity of a quantitative trait is evaluated against the expectation from random drift, using the Q_ST-F_ST comparison. As possible driving factors of sexual selection, we consider two types of mate-choice preference: preference for the population average and preference for a culturally-transmitted arbitrary trend. Our simulations suggest that sexual selection can, under certain circumstances, maintain and/or generate a detectable amount of inter-population phenotypic diversity, even when populations are ecologically identical and loosely connected to each other by mutual migration. Since mating decisions in humans are considerably affected by social learning, human mate-choice preference may be more readily diversified between populations than in other animals. We suggest, therefore, that some of the observed human phenotypic variations may be better understood as a product of cultural, rather than ecological, diversification.

Ensemble perception of facial attractiveness

Ensemble perception, the extraction of a statistical summary of multiple instances of a feature, enables efficient processing of information. Here we investigated whether ensemble representations can be formed for facial attractiveness, a socially important complex feature. After verifying that our face stimuli produced by geometric morphing represented a valid continuum of attractiveness (Experiment 1), we asked participants to compare the average attractiveness of four faces with a single probe face. Whether the four faces were homogeneous or heterogeneous resulted in highly similar performance levels, suggesting the visual system could extract an ensemble representation of the attractiveness of a heterogeneous group of faces. Statistical simulations with human-level bias and noise indicated participants did not rely on subsampling one random face or the most/least attractive face from the array (Experiment 2). Ensemble perception of facial attractiveness was not affected by variance in the stimulus array (Experiment 3), did not depend on memory of individual faces in the array (Experiment 4), and could be extended to larger arrays with faces asymmetrically distributed around the set mean (Experiment 5). Our findings give further evidence to the prevalence of perception of statistical regularities in vision.

Sex and Physiological Cycles Affect the Automatic Perception of Attractive Opposite-Sex Faces: A Visual Mismatch Negativity Study

Facial attractiveness plays important roles in social interaction. Electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies found several brain areas to be differentially responsive to attractive relative to unattractive faces. However, little is known about the time course of the information processing, especially under the unattended condition. Based on a "cross-modal delayed response" paradigm, the present study aimed to explore the automatic mechanism of facial attractiveness processing of females with different physiological cycles and males, respectively, through recording the event-related potentials in response to (un)attractive opposite-sex faces by two experiments. The attractiveness-related visual mismatch negativity (attractiveness vMMN) in posterior scalp distribution was recorded in both the experiments, which indicated that attractive faces could be processed automatically. And high-attractive opposite-sex faces can elicit larger vMMN in males than females in menstrual period in Study 1, but similar as females in ovulatory period in Study 2. Furthermore, by comparison, the latency of attractiveness vMMN in females with the ovulatory period was the longest. These results indicated as follows: (1) Males were more sensitive to attractive female faces, (2) females in ovulatory period were also attracted by the attractive male faces, (3) the long vMMN latency in females during ovulatory period suggested a special reproductive motivation to avoid being tainted by genes, which takes priority over the breeding motivation.

Hybrid marriages and phenotypic heterosis in offspring: Evidence from China

In genetics, heterosis refers to the phenomenon that cross-breeding within species leads to offspring that are genetically fitter than their parents and exhibit improved phenotypic characteristics. Based on the theory of heterosis and existing genetic evidence, offspring of "hybrid" marriages (spouses originating from different states/provinces/countries/areas), though relatively rare due to physical boundaries, may exhibit greater genetic fitness in terms of intelligence, height, or physical attractiveness (the "distance-performance" hypothesis). This study explores whether heterosis is a contributing factor to offspring's educational attainment in China by applying a high-dimensional fixed effects (HDFE) modelling framework to the unique 0.1% micro-sample of the 2000 Chinese Population Census data. Concerning potential endogeneity of hybrid marriages, we conduct a series of robustness checks. Reassuringly, the estimated heterosis effect remains significantly positive across various measurements, after controlling for parental educational attainments/height, environmental influences, and over a thousand region and region-by-year fixed effects. The effects in male and higher-educated offspring are found to be stronger. Results are replicated when analyzing body height using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey. Although endogeneity of "hybrid marriages" may not be completely ruled out, the current study sheds light on the potentially beneficial effects of interprovincial migration on population-level human capital accumulation, and we hope that this paper can intrigue future studies that further address endogeneity. The implied heterosis effect could, therefore, be profound for Homo sapiens as a species from an evolutionary point of view. An additional important implication is that the overall genetic influences of parents on offspring's performance may be further decomposed into a conventional heredity effect and a heterosis effect that has been neglected previously.

Attractiveness as a Function of Skin Tone and Facial Features: Evidence from Categorization Studies

Participants rated the attractiveness and racial typicality of male faces varying in their facial features from Afrocentric to Eurocentric and in skin tone from dark to light in two experiments. Experiment 1 provided evidence that facial features and skin tone have an interactive effect on perceptions of attractiveness and mixed-race faces are perceived as more attractive than single-race faces. Experiment 2 further confirmed that faces with medium levels of skin tone and facial features are perceived as more attractive than faces with extreme levels of these factors. Black phenotypes (combinations of dark skin tone and Afrocentric facial features) were rated as more attractive than White phenotypes (combinations of light skin tone and Eurocentric facial features); ambiguous faces (combinations of Afrocentric and Eurocentric physiognomy) with medium levels of skin tone were rated as the most attractive in Experiment 2. Perceptions of attractiveness were relatively independent of racial categorization in both experiments.

For Your Local Eyes Only: Culture-Specific Face Typicality Influences Perceptions of Trustworthiness

Recent findings show that typical faces are judged as more trustworthy than atypical faces. However, it is not clear whether employment of typicality cues in trustworthiness judgment happens across cultures and if these cues are culture specific. In two studies, conducted in Japan and Israel, participants judged trustworthiness and attractiveness of faces. In Study 1, faces varied along a cross-cultural dimension ranging from a Japanese to an Israeli typical face. Own-culture typical faces were perceived as more trustworthy than other-culture typical faces, suggesting that people in both cultures employ typicality cues when judging trustworthiness, but that the cues, indicative of typicality, are culture dependent. Because perceivers may be less familiar with other-culture typicality cues, Study 2 tested the extent to which they rely on available facial information other than typicality, when judging other-culture faces. In Study 2, Japanese and Israeli faces varied from either Japanese or Israeli attractive to unattractive with the respective typical face at the midpoint. For own-culture faces, trustworthiness judgments peaked around own-culture typical face. However, when judging other-culture faces, both cultures also employed attractiveness cues, but this effect was more apparent for Japanese participants. Our findings highlight the importance of culture when considering the effect of typicality on trustworthiness judgments.

When Beauty Breaks Down: Investigation of the Effect of Spatial Quantisation on Aesthetic Evaluation of Facial Images

Research on the perception of facial attractiveness has been dominated by aspects of averageness, symmetry, and secondary sex characteristics of faces. Almost absent is systematic research on the spatial scale (coarseness) of detail sufficient to carry information about facial attractiveness. In the present study, subjects were asked to evaluate the attractiveness of faces while the coarseness of detail of the face images was systematically decreased. Subjects discriminated a set of attractive faces from the set of unattractive faces when the coarseness of spatial quantisation changed from 10 to 17 pixels per face. Some of the faces regarded as attractive had the steepest shift in the rating towards the more attractive end of the scale at different resolutions. Once perceived as attractive in the coarse scale of image resolution, the faces generally did not return to the unattractive group with a subsequent finer scale of description. No single critical scale of detail was revealed that would have dramatically changed the perception of facial attractiveness from uncertain to distinct.

On the Borders of Harmful and Helpful Beauty Biases

Research with European Caucasian samples demonstrates that attractiveness-based biases in social evaluation depend on the constellation of the sex of the evaluator and the sex of the target: Whereas people generally show positive biases toward attractive opposite-sex persons, they show less positive or even negative biases toward attractive same-sex persons. By examining these biases both within and between different ethnicities, the current studies provide new evidence for both the generalizability and the specificity of these attractiveness-based social perception biases. Examining within-ethnicity effects, Study 1 is the first to demonstrate that samples from diverse ethnic backgrounds parallel the finding of European Caucasian samples: The advantageous or adverse effects of attractiveness depend on the gender constellation of the evaluator and the evaluated person. Examining between-ethnicity effects, Study 2 found that these attractiveness-based biases emerge almost exclusively toward targets of the evaluator’s own ethnic background; these biases were reduced or eliminated for cross-ethnicity evaluations and interaction intentions. We discuss these findings in light of evolutionary principles and reflect on potential interactions between culture and evolved cognitive mechanisms.

Arguing That Black Is White: Racial Categorization of Mixed-Race Faces

Previous research has demonstrated that racially ambiguous faces (blended from Black and White parent faces) are categorized as being Black more often than White. This has been taken as support for social concept of hypodescent: mixed-race people are categorized with the same race as the socially subordinate parent. The current research explores racial categorization further by using two sets of participants: those with greater experience of White faces and those with greater experience of Black faces. It was found that mixed-race faces were categorized as being Black more often than White by the former but White more often than Black by the latter group. Racial categorization of a mixed-race face, therefore, depends upon who is doing the categorizing. A face that may be argued as appearing racially Black to one person would be argued as appearing racially White to another depending on their experience.

Beauty in a multicultural world

The increased demand for facial cosmetic surgery has come from a more diverse, informed, and selective patient population from all walks of life. Virtually no two patients have the same background or cosmetic objectives. However, the classic tenets of beauty including phi, symmetry, averageness, youthfulness, and sexual dimorphism can be applied to persons of all ethnicities to assist in objectifying the abstract concept.

Is There an Own-Race Preference in Attractiveness?

Even in multicultural nations interracial relationships and marriages are quite rare, one reflection of assortative mating. A relatively unexplored factor that could explain part of this effect is that people may find members of their own racial group more attractive than members of other groups. We tested whether there is an own-race preference in attractiveness judgments, and also examined the effect of familiarity by comparing the attractiveness ratings given by participants of different ancestral and geographic origins to faces of European, East Asian and African origin. We did not find a strong own-race bias in attractiveness judgments, but neither were the data consistent with familiarity, suggesting an important role for other factors determining the patterns of assortative mating observed.

Mixed-Ethnicity Face Shape and Attractiveness in Humans

Many studies show agreement within and between populations and cultures for general judgments of facial attractiveness. Studies that have examined the attractiveness of specific traits have also highlighted cross-cultural differences for factors such as symmetry, averageness, and masculinity. One trait that should be preferred across cultures is heterozygosity. Indeed, several studies suggest that mixed ethnicity, in terms of appearing to possess a mixture of traits from different human population groups, may be found attractive, which could reflect preferences for heterozygosity. We examined preferences for manipulated face shape associated with different populations in both Europeans (Britain) and Africans (Guinea-Bissau). We found that mixed-ethnicity face shapes were more attractive than enhanced single-ethnicity face shape across both populations. These results are consistent with evolutionary theories suggesting individuals should prefer heterozygosity in partners because facial cues to mixed-ethnicity are likely to indicate diverse genes compared to cues that indicate a face belongs to a single particular culture or population.

Remembering beauty: roles of orbitofrontal and hippocampal regions in successful memory encoding of attractive faces

Behavioral data have shown that attractive faces are better remembered but the neural mechanisms of this effect are largely unknown. To investigate this issue, female participants were scanned with event-related functional MRI (fMRI) while rating the attractiveness of male faces. Memory for the faces was tested after fMRI scanning and was used to identify successful encoding activity (subsequent memory paradigm). As expected, attractive faces were remembered better than other faces. The study yielded three main fMRI findings. First, activity in the right orbitofrontal cortex increased linearly as a function of attractiveness ratings. Second, activity in the left hippocampus increased as a function of subsequent memory (subsequent misses<low confidence hits<high confidence hits). Third, functional connectivity between these orbitofrontal and hippocampal regions was stronger during the encoding of attractive than neutral or unattractive faces. These results suggest that better memory for attractive faces reflects greater interaction between a region associated with reward, the orbitofrontal cortex, and a region associated with successful memory encoding, the hippocampus.

Perceptions of health and attractiveness: the effects of body fat, muscularity, gender, and ethnicity

Three hundred and thirty-three participants rated the health and attractiveness of schematic figures varying in muscularity, adiposity, gender, and race. In general, overweight and underweight figures were rated as less healthy and attractive. However, overweight figures with high levels of muscularity were rated more highly on these dimensions than figures with less muscularity. Females assigned higher attractiveness ratings than males; African Americans provided higher ratings than Caucasians and Hispanics for female figures and lower ratings than Caucasian and Hispanic raters for male figures. Theoretical explanations and applied implications are offered.

Shared brain activity for aesthetic and moral judgments: implications for the Beauty-is-Good stereotype

The Beauty-is-Good stereotype refers to the assumption that attractive people possess sociably desirable personalities and higher moral standards. The existence of this bias suggests that the neural mechanisms for judging facial attractiveness and moral goodness overlap. To investigate this idea, we scanned participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they made attractiveness judgments about faces and goodness judgments about hypothetical actions. Activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex increased as a function of both attractiveness and goodness ratings, whereas activity in the insular cortex decreased with both attractiveness and goodness ratings. Within each of these regions, the activations elicited by attractiveness and goodness judgments were strongly correlated with each other, supporting the idea of similar contributions of each region to both judgments. Moreover, activations in orbitofrontal and insular cortices were negatively correlated with each other, suggesting an opposing relationship between these regions during attractiveness and goodness judgments. These findings have implications for understanding the neural mechanisms of the Beauty-is-Good stereotype.

Why are Mixed-Race People Perceived as more Attractive?

Previous, small scale, studies have suggested that people of mixed race are perceived as being more attractive than non-mixed-race people. Here, it is suggested that the reason for this is the genetic process of heterosis or hybrid vigour (ie cross-bred offspring have greater genetic fitness than pure-bred offspring). A random sample of 1205 black, white, and mixed-race faces was collected. These faces were then rated for their perceived attractiveness. There was a small but highly significant effect, with mixed-race faces, on average, being perceived as more attractive. This result is seen as a perceptual demonstration of heterosis in humans—a biological process that may have implications far beyond just attractiveness.

New "golden" ratios for facial beauty

In four experiments, we tested the existence of an ideal facial feature arrangement that could optimize the attractiveness of any face given its facial features. Participants made paired comparisons of attractiveness between faces with identical facial features but different eye-mouth distances and different interocular distances. We found that although different faces have varying attractiveness, individual attractiveness is optimized when the face's vertical distance between the eyes and the mouth is approximately 36% of its length, and the horizontal distance between the eyes is approximately 46% of the face's width. These "new" golden ratios match those of an average face.

Race Coding and the Other-Race Effect in Face Recognition

Other-race faces are generally recognised more poorly than own-race faces. According to Levin's influential race-coding hypothesis, this other-race recognition deficit results from spontaneous coding of race-specifying information, at the expense of individuating information, in other-race faces. Therefore, requiring participants to code race-specifying information for all faces should eliminate the other-race effect by reducing recognition of own-race faces to the level of other-race faces. We tested this prediction in two experiments. Race coding was induced by requiring participants to rate study faces on race typicality (experiment 1) or to categorise them by race (experiment 2). Neither manipulation reduced the other-race effect, providing no support for the race-coding hypothesis. Instead, race-coding instructions marginally increased the other-race effect in experiment 1 and had no effect in experiment 2. These results do not support the race-coding hypothesis. Surprisingly, a control task of rating the attractiveness of study faces increased the other-race effect, indicating that deeper encoding of faces does not necessarily reduce the effect (experiment 1). Finally, the normally robust other-race effect was absent when participants were instructed to individuate other-race faces (experiment 2). We suggest that poorer recognition of other-race faces may reflect reduced perceptual expertise with such faces and perhaps reduced motivation to individuate them.

Social heterosis and the maintenance of genetic diversity

Genetic diversity in species is often high in spite of directional selection or strong genetic drift. One resolution to this paradox may be through fitness benefits arising from interactions of genetically diverse individuals. Advantageous phenotypes that are impossible in single individuals (e.g. being simultaneously bold and shy) can be expressed by groups composed of genetically different individuals. Genetic diversity, therefore, can produce mutualistic benefits shared by all group members. We define this effect as 'social heterosis', and mathematically demonstrate maintenance of allelic diversity when diverse groups or neighbourhoods are more reproductively successful than homogenous ones. Through social heterosis, genetic diversity persists without: frequency dependence within groups, migration, balancing selection, genetic linkages, overdominance, antagonistic pleiotropy or nonrandom allele assortment. Social heterosis may also offer an alternative evolutionary pathway to cooperation that does not require clustering of related individuals, nepotistic favouritism towards kin, or overt reciprocity.

Facial attractiveness: General patterns of facial preferences

This review covers universal patterns in facial preferences. Facial attractiveness has fascinated thinkers since antiquity, but has been the subject of intense scientific study for only the last quarter of a century. Many facial features contribute to facial attractiveness: Averageness and symmetry are preferred by males and females, probably because they signal genetic quality and developmental stability. Men prefer highly feminized female faces because they reflect high estrogen levels and low testosterone levels. This indicates that the woman is reproductively healthy. Women, on the other hand, prefer a moderate level of male facial masculinity, since facial masculinity that is too pronounced signals high level of testosterone and, thereby, a poorly developed pro-family personality. In women, facial hair is detrimental to facial attractiveness. In men, the effect is not consistent. Faces with a clear complexion are attractive to both men and women. Men prefer light and smooth skin in women. Positive facial expressions also enhance facial attractiveness. Many factors, in particular skin condition and facial proportions, affect perceived age, which is an important component of facial attractiveness. Men in particular strongly prefer youthful-looking female faces. Facial preferences enable an individual to recognize reproductively fit mates. Therefore, facial preferences are adaptive, although non-adaptive mechanisms related to general brain function also play a role.