Original Article
Women and men integrate facial information differently in appraising the beauty of a face

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2017.07.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Facial beauty plays a crucial role in social interactions, particularly in mating and reproduction. Therefore, the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms used for facial beauty assessment should be susceptible to different evolutionary and cultural pressures across genders and thus shape different observational appraising strategies. Using a novel approach, I evaluated the observers' subjective and unique importance given to specific facial attributes: eyes, nose, lips, and hair, and their spatial organization in the process of appraising the beauty of the whole face. These importance measures reveal the modulation of the integration of attributes strategy across the gender of observers and the sex of face. The degree of agreement about the beauty of the studied facial attributes was modulated across gender of observers and, for women observers, also across sex of face. Finally, I show that beauty appraisal can be mainly explained by a simple additive manner of isolated facial attributes appraisals.

Introduction

The beauty of faces is influential in many aspects of social interactions in general (Dion et al., 1972, Little et al., 2007) and in choice of mate in particular (Buss and Barnes, 1986, Walster et al., 1966). Since the publication of Darwin's theory of natural selection (1859), the variability of perceived attractiveness has been analyzed in terms of the evolved signal content of striking phenotypic features, arguing that reproduction with a more attractive partner will increase an individual's biological fitness (Andersson, 1994, Barrett et al., 2002, Little et al., 2008). Choosing the right mate is crucial for successful reproduction, so reliable mechanisms for such recognition are favored by evolution. As a result, evolutionary, and maybe even cultural, pressures may act differently on women and men and, as a result, shape different observational beauty appraisal strategies across male and female genders.

In order to compare beauty appraisal strategies, one has to quantify the diagnostic dimensions of facial information that human observers use to judge the beauty of a face. Throughout history, several ideal characteristics of beauty have been suggested, mainly by formulating canons of face shapes and distances between selected facial landmarks of particularly meaningful and salient locations. The ancient Greeks believed aesthetic preferences fulfil certain geometrical conditions, such as the Golden Ratio. In the renaissance period, Neoclassical Canons were considered the ideal ratios of beautiful faces (Edler, 2001, Vegter and Hage, 2000).

Over the last few decades, many studies of facial beauty have focused on three main diagnostic dimensions: averageness, symmetry and sexual dimorphism (Gangestad et al., 1994, Langlois and Roggman, 1990, Perrett et al., 1998). On the other hand, the role of facial parts such as eyes, nose, and mouth, and their spatial organization and inter-attribute interactions (holistic processing) is a central issue in facial recognition research, suggesting different mechanisms and brain activation with single facial parts and their combinations (Arcurio et al., 2012, Carey and Diamond, 1977, Farah et al., 1998, Gold et al., 2012, Maurer et al., 2002, Tanaka and Farah, 1993). The common view is that the human perceptual system integrates facial information into a gestalt whole rather than processing facial features in a non-interacting manner. The composite face effect has been used in many studies to demonstrate that facial parts cannot be perceived independently and therefore interact (Rossion, 2013, Young et al., 1987). Nevertheless, there are some examples for which information conveyed from isolated facial parts is almost optimal when summed up in an additive manner (e.g., Maloney & Dal Martello, 2006). To date, the extent to which the impression of isolated facial parts shapes the assessment of facial beauty has not been studied.

What is the contribution of facial sub-regions and their spatial organization to the assessment of the beauty of the whole face? Pointing out the beauty of specific facial attributes is common in everyday life. The place of aesthetic characteristics of some facial attributes is well demonstrated by commonly used phrases, such as ‘pretty eyes’ or ‘beautiful hair’. This suggests that facial beauty resides at different levels within the whole face at one level and at the level of ‘facial parts’ attributes at sub-levels. Nevertheless, the unique contribution of such specific sub-level attributes and the way they are integrated to make a beauty appraisal of the whole face, have not been investigated systematically and remain obscure.

Therefore, a prospective avenue for understanding the diagnostic dimensions which humans utilize to appraise facial beauty is an approach that rigorously quantifies the importance of the beauty of facial attributes, such as facial sub-regions and their spatial organization, to the beauty impression of the whole face.

Here, I address three questions about facial attributes processing for the purpose of beauty appraisal. Firstly, is the integration of facial attributes modulated by the gender of observer and the sex of face? Secondly, to what extent are the inter-subjective facial preferences modulated across facial attributes, gender of observer and sex of face? While observers may associate a similar degree of importance with certain facial attributes, they may disagree about the level of the beauty of individual attributes. A category of attributes which has a high level of agreement within a group of observers is an indication that there is a consensus, at least to some extent, about desirable specifications, such as shape or color, in that category. Such unique specifications may reflect a reliable signal of biological fitness or alternatively a social convention. Finally, to what extent is beauty appraisal based on the additive processing of facial attributes?

In the current study, I quantitatively evaluate the unique contribution of specific facial attributes to the beauty appraisal of whole faces. I use these measures to investigate how the integration strategy is modulated across the gender of observers and across the sex of face. Later, I study the modulations of inter-subjective homogeneity across the gender of observers and across the sex of face. Finally, I show that the majority of the feasible variance of beauty appraisal of the whole face is explained by the appraisal of the isolated attributes I used in the current study.

The facial phenotype is derived by the biological sex; therefore throughout this paper, I classify the face stimuli by their biological sex: female or male (Enlow, 1996). However, since it is unknown which factors shape the strategy of beauty perception, biological or cultural; I have chosen to follow the common distinction used in cross-gender studies and classify the observers by the term ‘gender’: women or men.

Section snippets

Observers

Sixty four observers (32 women, M = 22.8, SD = 2.3 years; 32 men, M = 23.8, SD = 2.7 years) participated in a task rating the female face. Sixty four observers (32 women, M = 22.4 years, SD = 1.9 years; 32 men, M = 23.8 years, SD = 3.2 years) participated in a task rating the male face. This sample size was determined in advance. As a data driven study utilizing a novel method, the types of effects and their expected sizes were unknown. All observers were students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with normal

Results

The beauty score of an individual stimulus was derived from the pairwise comparison in the following way. For each trial, if an individual stimulus was rated in a single pairwise comparison as ‘much more beautiful’ than the other, it got the value 2 and the other, less beautiful individual stimulus, got the value − 2. In a similar way, the ‘more beautiful’ response yielded ratings of 1 to the more beautiful stimulus and − 1 to the less beautiful stimulus. ‘Equally beautiful’ was evaluated as 0

Discussion

In human social interaction, the beauty of the face has influential consequences for individuals and groups. The beauty of opposite-sex face is proposed to reflect, at least in part, appropriate mate choice for reproduction. Therefore it is expected that men and women should hold different strategies for beauty appraisal. In the current study I sought to find strategy modulation in two complementary facets of beauty appraisal: (i) the importance associated by observers to certain facial

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Ya’acov Ritov from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for providing the facilities needed for conducting this study and to Benedict Jones from the University of Glasgow for his useful comments. This work was supported by the Louis Guttman Scholarship Fund, Israel Science Foundation and ESRC RES-060-25-0010.

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