Aesthetics of Faces
Behavioral and Electrophysiological Indices of Evaluative and Descriptive Judgment Processes
Abstract
Temporal and brain topographic characteristics of the aesthetic judgment of male and female faces were investigated, using event-related potentials and reaction times. The evaluative aesthetic judgment of facial beauty (beautiful vs. notbeautiful) was contrasted with a nonevaluative descriptive judgment of head shape (round vs. oval). Analysis showed longer reaction times in the descriptive than in the evaluative task, suggesting that the descriptive judgment demanded more cognitive effort and may entail greater uncertainty. Electrophysiologically, the evaluative judgment elicited a negativity (400 to 480 ms) for the judgment not beautiful, maximal over midline leads. A comparable deflection has been previously reported for evaluative judgments of graphic patterns. It was interpreted as an impression formation independent of the type of stimulus material, occurring when an aesthetic entity is judged intentionally. Besides this effect, which was independent of the gender of the face, the temporal characteristics of aesthetic evaluation differed depending on the gender of the face. We report a negativity for male faces only (280–440 ms) and a late positivity (520–1200 ms), which was stronger for female faces, both concerning not beautiful judgments. Thus, the evaluation of male and female facial beauty was processed in different time-windows. The descriptive judgment round elicited a larger posterior positivity compared with oval (320–620 ms). These results complement investigations of the architecture and time course of evaluative aesthetic and descriptive judgment processes, using faces as stimulus material.
References
1991). Averaged faces are attractive, but very attractive faces are not average. Psychological Science, 2, 123–125.
(1991). American Electroencephalographic Society guidelines for standard electrode position nomenclature. Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology, 8, 200–202.
. (2004). Symmetry, averageness, and feature size in the facial attractiveness of women. Acta Psychologica, 117, 313–332.
(1996). Electrophysiological studies of face perception in humans. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 8, 551–565.
(2000). Structural encoding and identification in face processing: ERP evidence for separate mechanisms. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 17, 35–54.
(2003). Electrical brain responses to descriptive versus evaluative judgments of music. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 999, 155–157.
(2000). Desires in human mating. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 907, 39–49.
(1996). Attitudes to the right: Evaluative processing is associated with lateralized late positive event-related brain potentials. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 1205–1219.
(1994). Bioelectrical echoes from evaluative categorizations: I. A late positive brain potential that varies as a function of trait negativity and extremity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 115–125.
(1996). Electrocortical differentiation of evaluative and nonevaluative categorizations. Psychological Science, 7, 318–321.
(1995). Bioelectrical echoes from evaluative categorization: II. A late positive brain potential that varies as a function of attitude registration rather than attitude report. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 997–1013.
(1986). Measuring the physical in physical attractiveness: Quasiexperiments on the sociobiology of female facial beauty. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 925–935.
(1995). “Their ideas of beauty are, on the whole, the same as ours”: Consistency and variability in the cross-cultural perception of female physical attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 261–279.
(2005). Attitudes to the right- and left: Frontal ERP asymmetries associated with stimulus valence and processing goals. Neuroimage, 28, 827–834.
(1871). The descent of man and selection in relation to sex. London: Murray.
(2000). Event-related brain potentials distinguish processing stages involved in face perception and recognition. Clinical Neurophysiology, 111, 694–705.
(1994). Human (Homo sapiens) facial attractiveness and sexual selection: The role of symmetry and averageness. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 108, 233–242.
(1984). Looking at faces: Local and global aspects of scanpaths. In ), Theoretical and applied aspects of eye movement research (pp. 523–533). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
(2000). Modulation of event-related potentials by prototypical and atypical faces. Neuroreport, 11, 1871–1875.
(1998). The visual process method: A new method to study physical attractiveness. Evolution and Human Behavior, 19, 111–123.
(1989). Facial resemblance in engaged and married couples. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 6, 223–229.
(2007a). Electrophysiological indices of processing aesthetics: spontaneous or intentional processes?. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 65, 20–31.
(2007b). Electrophysiological indices of processing symmetry and aesthetics: a result of judgment categorization or judgment report?. Journal of Psychophysiology, 21, 9–21.
(2000). Electrophysiological evidence of implicit and explicit categorization processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 660–676.
(1998). Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: The negativity bias in evaluative categorizations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 887–900.
(2004). Individual and group modeling of aesthetic judgment strategies. British Journal of Psychology, 95, 41–56.
(2006). Bridging the arts and the sciences: A framework for the psychology of aesthetics. Leonardo, 39, 155–162.
(2004). The primacy of beauty in judging the aesthetics of objects. Psychological Reports, 94, 1253–1260.
(2002). Aesthetic judgments of novel graphic patterns: Analyses of individual judgments. Perceptual & Motor Skills, 95, 755–766.
(2003). Descriptive and evaluative judgment processes: Behavioral and electrophysiological indices of processing symmetry and aesthetics. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 3, 289–299.
(1986). Multiple P300s to emotional stimuli and their theoretical significance. Psychophysiology, 23, 684–694.
(1997). Facial beauty and the late positive component of event-related potentials. The Journal of Sex Research, 24, 188–198.
(1995). Sexual selection, physical attractiveness, and facial neoteny: Cross-cultural evidence and implications. Current Anthropology, 36, 723–748.
(1999). Evolution, the invisible artist. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 17, 101–120.
(1990). Attractive faces are only average. Psychological Science, 1, 115–121.
(1994). What is average and what is not average about attractive faces?. Psychological Science, 5, 214–220.
(2001). Self-perceived attractiveness influences human female preferences for sexual dimorphism and symmetry in male faces. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 268 (1462), 39–44.
(1983). Knowing and liking. Motivation and Emotion, 7, 125–144.
(2002). The many faces of configural processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(6), 255–260.
(2002). Configural face processing develops more slowly than featural face processing. Perception, 31, 553–566.
(2003). The effect of facial symmetry on perceptions of personality and attractiveness. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 339–347.
(1971). The assessment and analysis of handedness: The Edinburgh inventory. Neuropsychologia, 9, 97–113.
(1999). Gender differences in late positive components evoked by human faces. Psychophysiology, 36, 176–185.
(1999). Symmetry and human facial attractiveness. Evolution and Human Behavior, 20, 295–307.
(1994). Facial shape and judgments of female attractiveness. Nature, 368(6468), 239–242.
(1999). Rapid emotional face processing in the human right and left brain hemispheres: An ERP study. Neuroreport, 10, 2691–2698.
(1995). Cognitive and biological determinants of P300: An integrative review. Biological Psychology, 41, 103–146.
(2000). The science of art: How the brain responds to beauty. Philadelphia, PA: Templeton Foundation Press.
(1999). The science of art: A neurological theory of aesthetic experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6(6–7), 15–51.
(1998). Facial symmetry and the perception of beauty. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 5, 659–669.
(2002). What makes a face attractive and why: The role of averageness in defining facial beauty. In , Facial attractiveness: Evolutionary, cognitive, and social perspectives (pp. 1–33). Westport, CT: Ablex.
(2000). Affective picture processing: The late positive potential is modulated by motivational relevance. Psychophysiology, 37, 257–261.
(1984). An investigation into component and configural processes underlying face perception. British Journal of Psychology, 75, 221–242.
(1993). Human facial beauty: Averageness, symmetry, and parasite resistance. Human Nature, 4, 237–269.
(1999). Facial attractiveness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3, 452–460.
(1996). Attention and communication: Eye-movement-based research paradigms. In , Visual attention and cognition. Amsterdam/New York: Elsevier.
(1977). Eye movement strategies involved in face perception. Perception, 6, 313–326.
(2005). Appearance of symmetry, beauty, and health in human faces. Brain and Cognition, 57, 261–263.
(