The influence of symmetry on children's judgments of facial attractiveness

Cuteness and the Power of Emotion

Background

There is an agreement among individuals from different cultures in how they judge the cuteness of a face. There are observations suggesting that some preferences may be neurobiological rather than cultural. Most of the studies conducted use adult faces with a neutral expression; however, the mechanisms involved in rating cuteness are not exactly the same as those involved in the perception of attractiveness. Furthermore, it is not always taken into account that emotional expressions influence the impression on the beauty of a face. The objective of the study is to evaluate the influence of the different emotions on the perception of cuteness of children's faces.

Materials and Methods

We included 60 adults and 21 children who observed 150 photographs of children's faces expressing the six basic emotions and had to rate facial cuteness.

Results

Participants gave the highest cuteness score to faces with happy emotions (mean [M] = 6.89, 95% confidence interval [CI] 6.48-7.30) and the lowest to those that expressed negative emotions (M = 5.32, 95% CI 4.87-5.78, t(160) = 5.08, P <.001). This was evidenced in adults and children of both genders, regardless of the gender of the stimulus.

Conclusions

In our study, we found that facial expression generates an impact on the perception that a subject has on the cuteness of the face. The faces that show happiness were scored as more cute compared to those that expressed anger, disgust, or sadness. We suggest that expression of positive emotions, like a smile, could increase the conducts associated with caring, placing the child in a more favorable situation for the future.

The Role of Art Expertise and Symmetry on Facial Aesthetic Preferences

Humans, like other species, have a preference for symmetrical visual stimuli, a preference that is influenced by factors such as age, sex, and artistic training. In particular, artistic training seems to decrease the rejection of asymmetry in abstract stimuli. However, it is not known whether the same trend would be observed in relation to concrete stimuli such as human faces. In this article, we investigated the role of expertise in visual arts, music, and dance, in the perceived beauty and attractiveness of human faces with different asymmetries. With this objective, the beauty and attractiveness of 100 photographs of faces with different degrees of asymmetry were evaluated by 116 participants with different levels of art expertise. Expertise in visual arts and dance was associated with the extent to which facial asymmetry influenced the beauty ratings assigned to the faces. The greater the art expertise in visual arts and dance, the more indifferent to facial asymmetry the participant was to evaluate beauty. The same effect was not found for music and neither for attractiveness ratings. These findings are important to help understand how face aesthetic evaluation is modified by artistic training and the difference between beauty and attractiveness evaluations.

Cognitive basis for the development of aesthetic preference: Findings from symmetry preference

Where is the visual aesthetic preference rooted from and what's its relationship with the perceptual preference that is emerging early? Do young children naturally prefer some visual stimuli or do they learn to appreciate visual stimuli for aesthetic pleasure? Here, for young preschool children who are on the age that the preferences are developing, we provide findings from a study to show that the interplay between early emerging perceptual sensitivity and perceptual exposure promotes the emergence of preschool children's aesthetic preferences for simple visual patterns. Specifically in the experiments, 4-year-old children were exposed to either symmetric or asymmetric non-figurative forms in a perceptually demanding game; the group of children who received exposure to symmetric patterns showed aesthetic preference to the exposed patterns, while no preference was found in the group that received exposure to asymmetric patterns. The following recognition test then showed that the symmetric objects were differentiated better and remembered more clearly by the children, indicating that the symmetry was perceptually encoded better. These findings suggest that the early emerging perceptual sensitivity to 'good features' such as symmetry provides the prior cognitive prerequisites, allowing visual perceptual exposure to nourish the eventual formation of aesthetic preference. Thus, the preferences for aesthetic appreciation are likely the outcome of the interplay between biological and ecological adaptation.

Why do you attract me but not others? Retrieval of person knowledge and its generalization bring diverse judgments of facial attractiveness

Judgments of facial attractiveness play an important role in social interactions. However, it still remains unclear why these judgments are malleable. The present study aimed to understand whether the retrieval of person knowledge leads to different judgments of attractiveness of the same face. Event-related potentials and learning-recognition tasks were used to investigate the effects of person knowledge on facial attractiveness. The results showed that compared with familiar faces that were matched with negative person knowledge, those matched with positive person knowledge were evaluated as more attractive and evoked a larger early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive complex (LPC). Additionally, positive similar faces had the same behavioral results and evoked large LPC, while unfamiliar faces did not have any significant effects. These results indicate that the effect of person knowledge on facial attractiveness occurs from early to late stage of facial attractiveness processing, and this effect could be generalized based on the similarity of the face structure, which occurred at the late stage. This mechanism may explain why individuals form different judgments of facial attractiveness.

Identifying Three-Dimensional Facial Fluctuating Asymmetry in Normal Pediatric Individuals: A Panel Assessment Outcome Study of Clinicians and Observers

This study measured three-dimensional facial fluctuating asymmetry in 600 normal and healthy Taiwanese individuals (6 to 12 years old) and assessed the perceptions of increasing levels of facial fluctuating asymmetric severity by using a panel composed of 20 clinicians (surgical professionals), as well as 20 adult and 40 pre-adolescent observers. On average, this normal cohort presented a facial fluctuating asymmetry of 0.96 ± 0.52 mm, with 0.52 ± 0.05, 0.67 ± 0.09, 1.01 ± 0.10, and 1.71 ± 0.36 mm for levels I, II, III, and IV of severity, respectively. For all categories of raters, significant differences in the average symmetry-asymmetry scale values were observed, with level I < level II < level III = level IV (all p < 0.01, except for level III vs. IV comparisons with p > 0.05). For level I, pre-adolescent observers presented a significantly (p < 0.05) higher symmetry-asymmetry scale value than adult observers, with no significant (all p > 0.05) differences for other comparisons. For overall facial asymmetry and levels II, III, and IV, no significant (all p > 0.05) differences were observed. This study reveals that the normal pediatric face is asymmetric and the panel assessment of facial fluctuating asymmetry was influenced by the level of severity and the category of raters and contributes to the literature by revealing that pre-adolescent raters present a similar or higher perception of facial asymmetry than adult raters.

Symmetrical Motifs in Young Children’s Drawings: A Study on Their Representations of Plant Life

Young children love drawing; this is without question. Besides that, drawings are also of interest to scholars and educators, since they seem to provide food for thought regarding children’s conceptual development during their early education. Different approaches are taken when it comes to analysing children’s drawings but insufficient attention has been given to the issue of the spontaneous depictions of symmetrical motifs in young children’s drawings. This pictorial phenomena might not go unnoticed by parents and teachers but the fact is that the scientific community has no reliable data regarding how children under 8 naturally draw symmetrical patterns to express themselves graphically. Accordingly, the present study analyses 116 drawings undertaken by children between 4 and 7 on a well-known natural issue in early childhood such as plant life. Pictorial motifs displaying both cyclic and dihedral symmetries were found in the pictorial sample under examination and the data gathered is put in perspective with the gender and educational level variables. The results of the study show that symmetry, particularly, dihedral symmetry, is a very common pictorial practice in the sample and, also, that the occurrence of symmetrical motifs displays a relationship with the independent variables considered in the study.

The aesthetic preference for symmetry dissociates from early-emerging attention to symmetry

Symmetry is a basic geometry property that affects people's aesthetic experience in common ways across cultures and historical periods, but the origins of the universal preference for symmetrical patterns is not clear. We assessed four-year-old children's and adults' reported aesthetic preferences between symmetrical and asymmetrical visual patterns, as well as their spontaneous attentional preferences between the patterns. We found a striking dissociation between these two measures in the children: Children looked longer at the symmetrical patterns, relative to otherwise similar but asymmetrical patterns, but they showed no explicit preference for those patterns. These findings suggest that the human's aesthetic preferences have high postnatal plasticity, calling into question theories that symmetry is a "core feature" mediating people's aesthetic experience throughout life. The findings also call into question the assumption, common to many studies of human infants, that attentional choices reflect subjective preferences or values.

Patterns of Eye Movements When Observers Judge Female Facial Attractiveness

The purpose of the present study is to explore the fixed model for the explicit judgments of attractiveness and infer which features are important to judge the facial attractiveness. Behavioral studies on the perceptual cues for female facial attractiveness implied three potentially important features: averageness, symmetry, and sexual dimorphy. However, these studies did not explained which regions of facial images influence the judgments of attractiveness. Therefore, the present research recorded the eye movements of 24 male participants and 19 female participants as they rated a series of 30 photographs of female facial attractiveness. Results demonstrated the following: (1) Fixation is longer and more frequent on the noses of female faces than on their eyes and mouths (no difference exists between the eyes and the mouth); (2) The average pupil diameter at the nose region is bigger than that at the eyes and mouth (no difference exists between the eyes and the mouth); (3) the number of fixations of male participants was significantly more than female participants. (4) Observers first fixate on the eyes and mouth (no difference exists between the eyes and the mouth) before fixating on the nose area. In general, participants attend predominantly to the nose to form attractiveness judgments. The results of this study add a new dimension to the existing literature on judgment of facial attractiveness. The major contribution of the present study is the finding that the area of the nose is vital in the judgment of facial attractiveness. This finding establish a contribution of partial processing on female facial attractiveness judgments during eye-tracking.

What does facial symmetry reveal about health and personality?

Over the last two decades, facial symmetry has been intensively researched. The present article aims to summarize empirical research concerning relations between facial symmetry and health and facial symmetry and personality. A systematic review of the literature shows that facial symmetry is one of the most influential visual markers of attractiveness and health, important for mate selection, while asymmetry can be considered a consequence of an individual’s inability to resist environmental and genetic stressors during development of the organism. However, in spite of evidence suggesting that preferences for facial symmetry are deeply rooted in our evolutionary history, a strong connection between facial symmetry and health is demonstrated only in studies measuring perceived health, while there is only scarce evidence corroborating the link between symmetry and actual health. The interconnections between facial symmetry and personality have not yet been extensively researched. Less than a dozen studies have addressed that issue and they have reached different conclusions. Some evidence suggests that facial symmetry signals personality attributes that indicate good psychological health, while other findings imply that pro-social personality traits negatively correlate with facial symmetry.

The influence of averageness on judgments of facial attractiveness: no own-age or own-sex advantage among children attending single-sex schools

We examined how recent biased face experience affects the influence of averageness on judgments of facial attractiveness among 8- and 9-year-old children attending a girls' school, a boys' school, and a mixed-sex school. We presented pairs of individual faces in which one face was transformed 50% toward its group average, whereas the other face was transformed 50% away from that average. Across blocks, the faces varied in age (adult, 9-year-old, or 5-year-old) and sex (male or female). We expected that averageness might influence attractiveness judgments more strongly for same-age faces and, for children attending single-sex schools, same-sex faces of that age because their prototype(s) should be best tuned to the faces they see most frequently. Averageness influenced children's judgments of attractiveness, but the strength of the influence was not modulated by the age of the face, nor did the effects of sex of face differ across schools. Recent biased experience might not have affected the results because of similarities between the average faces of different ages and sexes and/or because a minimum level of experience with a particular group of faces may be adequate for the formation of a veridical prototype and its influence on judgments of attractiveness. The results suggest that averageness affects children's judgments of the attractiveness of the faces they encounter in everyday life regardless of age or sex of face.