Beauty captures the attention of the beholder

The role of attention in the effect of facial attractiveness on time perception

Recent research has indicated that attractive faces often cause a dilation of our time perception thus affecting physical and mental health, and speculates that this could be relevant to the fact that attractive faces capture people's attention. Nevertheless, there was no direct experimental data to support this speculation. The present work was designed to illustrate how attention affects time perception of facial attractiveness. It utilized two experiments to investigate this phenomenon. In Experiment 1, perception of timing and attention bias were assessed using a temporal reproduction task and a dot-probe task. Increased attention bias was found to mediate the time dilation effect of facial attractiveness. Experiment 2 adopted dual-task paradigm, combining a temporal reproduction task and attractiveness rating task, to manipulate attention allocation. The findings suggested that allocating more attention to the task requiring timing enhanced the time dilation effect caused by the faces. Results of Experiments 1 and 2 converge to show that attention plays an essential role in the effects of facial attractiveness on time perception.

Toward facial rejuvenation; A clinical trial to assess the efficacy of nano fat grafting on wrinkles

INTRODUCTION

With increasing age, patients' facial volume decrease. For this reason, nano fat grafting has recently gained popularity as adjunctive treatment to facial rejuvenation procedures. However, few quantitative studies have been conducted to investigate the impact of nano fat on facial wrinkles.

AIMS

In the present study, authors aim to investigate the therapeutic effect of intradermal injection of nano fat on fine facial wrinkles and assess their changes over 7 months of follow-up.

METHODS

In this randomized trial, 15 patients with fine facial wrinkles were enrolled. The fat was harvested from the abdomen and processed into nano fat. Nano fat was injected into the facial wrinkles intradermally with a needle of 27 gauge. The patients were evaluated before and 7 months postinjection utilizing Visio face 1000D (CK electronic, manufactured in Germany); and four parameters of wrinkles (area, volume, depth, and percent area) were evaluated before and after the nano fat injection.

RESULTS

Our evaluation with Visio face showed that nano fat injection was significantly reduced the volume, area, depth, and percent area of wrinkles after 7 months of follow-up without serious long-lasting adverse effects. Moreover, wrinkles with higher percent area, depth and volume loss show greater improvement after the treatment. Our results also indicate that males and females equally benefit from this treatment except for the percent area parameter that was improved more significantly in male patients.

CONCLUSION

Our study showed that intradermal injection of nano fat significantly decreases the volume, area, depth, and percent area of fine facial wrinkles. Further quantitative studies with control groups and larger sample sizes are required.

Individual attractiveness preferences differentially modulate immediate and voluntary attention

Physical attractiveness plays a crucial role in mate choice for both men and women. This is reflected in visual attention: people immediately attend towards and look longer at attractive faces, especially when they are motivated to find a partner. However, previous studies did not incorporate real-life dating decisions. Here, we aimed to combine attentional tasks with individual attractiveness ratings and a real-life mate choice context, namely a speed-dating paradigm. We investigated whether heterosexual non-committed young adults showed biases in immediate and voluntary attention towards attractive faces and preferred dating partners. In line with previous research, we found considerable individual differences in individual attractiveness preferences. Furthermore, our results showed that men had a bias towards attractive faces and preferred dating partners in the immediate attention task, while results for women were mixed. In the voluntary attention task, however, both men and women had an attentional bias towards attractive faces and preferred dating partners. Our results suggest that individual attractiveness preferences are good predictors of especially voluntary attention. We discuss these findings from an evolutionary perspective and suggest directions for future research.

The Moral Significance of Aesthetics in Nature Imagery

To solicit support for nature and wildlife conservation, mission-driven organizations rely on professional nature and wildlife imagery in their media outlets and campaigns. We investigated whether-and if so, why-the aesthetics of images increase social media engagement (e.g., number of likes) and the extent to which images elicit moral concern for nature and wildlife. In Study 1 (N = 782 U.S. adults), we trained a neural network to predict image aesthetics in National Geographic's Instagram data and identified image-specific attributes that influence aesthetics. We found that image aesthetics predicted engagement with the Instagram posts. In Study 2 (N = 775 U.S. adults), we established the causal effect of aesthetics on engagement and moral concern, which is explained by self-transcendent emotions (awe and inspiration) and purity associated with an image. Study 3 (N = 406 U.S. adults) replicated the results, showing that our key effects were stronger for individuals who place higher importance on beauty. By demonstrating the moral significance of image aesthetics, we highlight the potential of the beauty of nature to invigorate global conservation efforts.

Would It Be Better if Instructors Technically Adjust Their Image or Voice in Online Courses? Impact of the Way of Instructor Presence on Online Learning

This study investigated the effects of the changes in the image and voice of instructors in online video courses on online learner's learning achievement, social presence, learning satisfaction, and academic emotion. Two simultaneous online experiments were conducted with 122 college students in the image experiment, where the course videos varied in terms of the instructor's image (original image, face-beautified image, virtual image, and no image), and 93 college students in the voice experiment, where the course videos varied in terms of the instructor's voice (original voice, mutated voice, computer-synthesized voice). The results showed that learners viewing videos without instructor images had better learning achievements and less academic boredom relative to those who viewed videos with instructor images. However, the real instructor images were able to promote learners' learning satisfaction of instructor-student interaction more than no image and virtual image and promote satisfaction of instructor teaching more than virtual image. Meanwhile, learners' evaluation of the real instructor images was better than that of the virtual instructor image, and their evaluation of the face-beautified instructor image was better than the original image. Moreover, learners evaluated real instructor voices better than the computer-synthesized voice. In addition, the linear regression analysis revealed that the evaluations of both instructor's image and voice had a positive relationship with learners' social presence, learning satisfaction, and enjoyment, whereas they had a negative relationship with learner's boredom. And the evaluation of the instructor's image positively predicted student's transfer learning achievement. Thus, we suggested that the way of instructor presence should be well-designed and integrated with the course's instructional design and image and voice processing technology can be applied to assist online video course development.

Does beauty capture the eye, even if it's not (overtly) adaptive? A comparative eye-tracking study of spontaneous attention and visual preference with VAST abstract art

Studies have routinely shown that individuals spend more time spontaneously looking at people or at mimetic scenes that they subsequently judge to be more aesthetically appealing. This "beauty demands longer looks" phenomenon is typically explained by biological relevance, personal utility, or other survival factors, with visual attraction often driven by structural features (symmetry, texture), which may signify fitness and to which most humans tend to respond similarly. However, what of objects that have less overtly adaptive relevance? Here, we consider whether people also look longer at abstract art with little associative/mimetic content that they subsequently rate for higher aesthetic appeal. We employed the "Visual aesthetic sensitivity test" (VAST), which consists of pairs of matched abstract designs with one example of each pair argued to be objectively 'aesthetically better' in regards to low-level features, thus offering a potential contrast between 'objective' (physical feature-based) and 'subjective' (personal taste-based) assessments. Participants (29 women) first looked at image pairs without a specific task and then in three follow-up blocks indicated their preference within the pairs and rated the individual images for liking and for presumed ratings by an art expert. More preferred designs were looked at longer. However, longer looking only occurred in line with participants' subjective tastes. This suggests a general correlation of attention and visual beauty, which-in abstract art-may nonetheless be related to features that are not identified by experts as more generally appealing and thus may not directly map to other (more utility-related) stimuli types.

Perceptual Advantage of Animal Facial Attractiveness: Evidence From b-CFS and Binocular Rivalry

Research has shown that attractive human faces enjoy an advantage in both conscious and preconscious processing. Here we examined whether this preference for attractiveness is exclusive to human faces by measuring participants’ sensitivity to the attractiveness of cat and tiger faces. Experiment 1 measured the time taken to break continuous flash suppression (b-CFS), whereas Experiment 2 measured the dominant time in binocular rivalry (BR). The results showed that attractive cat faces were detected more quickly (Experiment 1) and dominated for longer time in visual awareness (Experiment 2). However, no effect of attractiveness was found for tiger faces in Experiment 1, while attractive tiger faces also dominated for longer time in visual awareness in Experiment 2. The results provide first evidence that the preference for attractive animal faces can be shown involuntarily or without apparent conscious control. The findings suggest that human preference for facial attractiveness may contain an aesthetic element rather than being a purely adaptive means for mate choice.

Ugliness Judgments Alert us to Cues of Pathogen Presence

Little is known about the psychology of ugliness. We propose that ugliness judgments are linked to the behavioral immune system, alerting us to objects that may contain potentially harmful diseases. Exploring this possibility, in five studies ( N = 1,552), we found that ugly human faces (Studies 1a and 1b), ugly animals (Study 2), and—to a lesser degree—ugly buildings (Study 2) elicit disgust controlling for other avoidance-motivated emotional responses. Furthermore, the presence (vs. absence) of disease cues were found to elicit ugliness judgments (Studies 3 and 4) suggesting that ugliness judgments respond to cues of pathogen presence. As such, ugliness may activate the behavioral immune system, alerting us to stimuli that pose pathogen risk.

Mechanisms for the Cognitive Processing of Attractiveness in Adult and Infant Faces: From the Evolutionary Perspective

Research on the cognitive processing of facial attractiveness has mainly focused on adult faces. Recent studies have revealed that the cognitive processing of facial attractiveness in infant faces is not the same as that in adult faces. Therefore, it is necessary to summarize the evidence on the processing of facial attractiveness in each kind of face and compare their underlying mechanisms. In this paper, we first reviewed studies on the cognitive processing of facial attractiveness in adult faces, including attentional and mnemonic processing, and then discussed the underlying mechanisms. Afterward, studies on facial attractiveness in infant faces were reviewed, and the underlying mechanisms were also discussed. Direct comparisons between the two kinds of cognitive processing were subsequently made. The results showed that the mechanisms for the processing of attractiveness in adult faces and infant faces are mainly motivated by the perspectives of mate selection and raising offspring, respectively, in evolutionary psychology. Finally, directions for future research are proposed.

Attentional Bias to Beauty with Evolutionary Benefits: Evidence from Aesthetic Appraisal of Landscape Architecture

Substantial evidence suggests that beauty is associated with the survival and reproduction of organisms. Landscape architecture is composed of a series of natural elements that have significant evolutionary implications. The present study used one pilot material ratings and three experiments to examine the mechanisms of aesthetic appraisals of landscape architecture. The results confirmed that landscape architecture elicited a sense of beauty and captured visual attention more easily than other types of architecture during explicit aesthetic rating task (Experiment 1) and implicit aesthetic perception task (dot-probe paradigm, Experiment 2). Furthermore, the spatial cueing paradigm revealed that response latencies were significantly faster for landscape architecture than non-landscape architecture on valid trials, but there was no significant difference in this contrast on invalid trials at 150-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA, Experiment 3a). At 500-ms SOA (Experiment 3b), participants responded significantly faster for landscape architecture on valid trials, but reacted significantly slower for landscape architecture on invalid trials. The findings indicated that the beauty of landscape architecture can be perceived implicitly, and only faster orienting of attention, but not delayed disengagement of attention was generated at early stages of the processing of landscape architecture. However, the attentional bias at later stages of attentional processes may be resulted from both faster orienting of attention and delayed disengagement of attention from landscape architecture photographs.

Combined Effects of Gaze and Orientation of Faces on Person Judgments in Social Situations

In social situations, faces of others can vary simultaneously in gaze and orientation. How these variations affect different kinds of social judgments, such as attractiveness or trustworthiness, is only partly understood. Therefore, we studied how different gaze directions, head angles, but also levels of facial attractiveness affect perceived attractiveness and trustworthiness. We always presented pairs of faces - either two average attractive faces or a highly attractive together with a less attractive face. We also varied gaze and head angles showing faces in three different orientations, front, three-quarter and profile view. In Experiment 1 (N = 62), participants rated averted gaze in three-quarter views as more attractive than in front and profile views, and evaluated faces with direct gaze in front views as most trustworthy. Moreover, faces that were being looked at by another face were seen as more attractive. Independent of the head orientation or gaze direction, highly attractive faces were rated as more attractive and more trustworthy. In Experiment 2 (N = 54), we found that the three-quarter advantage vanished when the second face was blurred during judgments, which demonstrates the importance of the presence of another person-as in a triadic social situation-as well as the importance of their visible gaze. The findings emphasize that social evaluations such as trustworthiness are unaffected by the esthetic advantage of three-quarter views of two average attractive faces, and that the effect of a faces' attractiveness is more powerful than the more subtle effects of gaze and orientations.

Video-Based Eye Tracking in Sex Research: A Systematic Literature Review

Although eye tracking has been used for decades, it has gained popularity in the area of sex research only recently. The aim of this article is to examine the potential merits of eye tracking for this field. We present a systematic review of the current use of video-based eye-tracking technology in this area, evaluate the findings, and identify future research opportunities. A total of 34 relevant studies published between 2006 and 2014 were identified for inclusion by means of online databases and other methods. We grouped them into three main areas of research: body perception and attractiveness, forensic research, and sexual orientation. Despite the methodological and theoretical differences across the studies, eye tracking has been shown to be a promising tool for sex research. The article suggests there is much potential for further studies to employ this technique because it is noninvasive and yet still allows for the assessment of both conscious and unconscious perceptional processes. Furthermore, eye tracking can be implemented in investigations of various theoretical backgrounds, ranging from biology to the social sciences.