Abstract
Facial beauty and moral beauty have been suggested to be two significant forms of social aesthetics. However, it remains unknown the extent to which there are neural underpinnings of the integration of these two forms of beauty. In the present study, participants were asked to make general aesthetic judgments of facial portraits and moral descriptions while collecting fMRI data. The facial portrait and moral description were randomly paired. Neurally, the appreciation of facial beauty and moral beauty recruited a common network involving the middle occipital gyrus (MOG) and medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC). The activities of the mOFC varied across aesthetic conditions, while the MOG was specifically activated in the most beautiful condition. In addition, there was a bilateral insular cortex response to ugliness specifically in the congruent aesthetic conditions, while SMA was selectively responsive to the most ugly condition. Activity associated with aesthetic conflict between facial and moral aesthetic information was limited to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), with enhanced response to the incongruent condition compared to the congruent condition. These findings provide novel neural evidence for the integrated aesthetics of social beauty and suggest that integrated aesthetics is a more complex cognitive process than aesthetics restricted to a single modality.
Highlights
Facial beauty and moral beauty have been recognized as two significant forms of social information in human communication
We addressed the following questions: Are the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and insular cortex involved in integrated aesthetics as in aesthetics that is restricted to a single modality? Are there any regions that are selectively involved in aesthetic conflict?
The current study further found that the bilateral insular cortex was largely activated in the facial ugliness-moral ugliness (FUMU) pure ugliness condition and to a lesser degree in facial beauty-moral beauty (FBMB)
Summary
Facial beauty and moral beauty have been recognized as two significant forms of social information in human communication. The activity of this region is enhanced when responding to unattractive faces[21,28,29] as well as for negative moralities[27,28] These studies lead to a consistent conclusion that facial and moral beauties recruit a www.nature.com/scientificreports/. Common network involving the mOFC and insular cortex and suggest that the overlap of neural mechanisms for facial and moral beauty may explain their interaction in the complex processing of social aesthetics. Facial beauty and moral beauty are always simultaneously involved in human beings It would be of high ecological validity to examine how these two forms of information are processed and integrated naturally, which may provide a window to understand integration of aesthetics from different modalities. We addressed the following questions: Are the mOFC and insular cortex involved in integrated aesthetics as in aesthetics that is restricted to a single modality? Are there any regions that are selectively involved in aesthetic conflict?
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