The boundary of holistic processing in the appraisal of facial attractiveness.

Chang Hong Liu,Wenfeng Chen

doi:10.1098/rsos.171616

Abstract

Facial attractiveness is often studied on the basis of the internal facial features alone. This study investigated how this exclusion of the external features affects the perception of attractiveness. We studied the effects of two most commonly used methods of exclusion, where the shape of an occluding mask was defined by either the facial outline or an oval. Participants rated attractiveness of the same faces under these conditions. Results showed that faces were consistently rated more attractive when they were masked by an oval shape rather than by their outline (Experiment 1). Attractive faces were more strongly affected by this effect than were less attractive faces when participants were able to control the viewing time. However, unattractive faces benefited more from this effect when the same face stimuli were presented briefly for only 20 ms (Experiment 2). Further manipulation confirmed that the effect was mainly due to the occlusion of a larger area of the external features rather than the regular and symmetrical features of the oval shape (Experiment 3) or lacks contextual cues about the face boundary (Experiment 4). The effect was only relative to masked faces, with no advantage over unmasked faces (Experiment 5), and is likely a result of the interaction between the shape of a mask and the internal features of the face. This holistic effect in the appraisal of facial attractiveness is striking, because the oval shape of the mask is not a part of the face but is the edge of an occluding object.

Highlights

Research on face perception routinely divides the face into internal and external features
The result means that when more external features were present in the outline condition, these internal differences were less evident to the observers, whose attention might be directed to the overall shape of a face
The effect was found in both exposure conditions, the results confirm the hypothesis that attractive faces benefit more from the effect when face stimuli were shown for a longer duration, whereas unattractive faces receive more benefit from the effect when face stimuli were shown for a brief duration

Summary

Introduction

Research on face perception routinely divides the face into internal and external features. Internal features consist of the eyes, nose and mouth, whereas external features include the hair, ears and facial outline. The distinction was first made in early studies of face recognition [1,2,3] and has been adopted in all areas of face research, including facial expression and facial attractiveness. Unlike scalp hair and paraphernalia, which can be altered, 2018 The Authors.

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