The influence of featural and configural changes on the attractiveness evaluation of one’s own face

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the present study, featural changes and configural changes were manipulated to explore the influence of such changes on the attractiveness evaluation of participants' own faces and other faces. Thirty female and 30 male participants were asked to complete three tasks, i.e., similarity rating of a given face to the original face, paired comparison of facial attractiveness, and subjective evaluation of facial attractiveness, on the same-sex original faces, featural faces and configural faces. The results revealed that the rank order of the attractiveness ratings of the three types of faces was generally identical: original faces > featural faces > configural faces, for both self-faces and other faces in male and female participants. More importantly, faces with configural changes were rated as less attractive than faces with featural changes, which is consistent with the configurational hypothesis. These findings have important implications for facial beautification.