Analyses of Facial Attractiveness on Feminised and Juvenilised Faces

Abstract

We conducted two experiments to investigate the psychological factors affecting the attractiveness of composite faces. Feminised or juvenilised Japanese faces were created by morphing between average male and female adult faces or between average male (female) adult and boy (girl) faces. In experiment 1, we asked the participants to rank the attractiveness of these faces. The results showed moderately juvenilised faces to be highly attractive. In experiment 2, we analysed the impressions the participants had of the composite faces by the semantic-differential method and determined the factors that largely affected attractiveness. On the basis of the factor scores, we plotted the faces in factor spaces and analysed the locations of attractive faces. We found that most of the attractive juvenilised faces involved impressions corresponding to an augmentation of femininity, characterised by the factors of 'elegance', 'mildness', and 'youthfulness', which the attractive faces potentially had.

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Hebephilia as Mental Disorder? A Historical, Cross-Cultural, Sociological, Cross-Species, Non-Clinical Empirical, and Evolutionary Review

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Recognition of Immaturity and Emotional Expressions in Blended Faces by Children with Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities

“…Previous studies that have failed to find relationships between configural processing and recognition of facial immaturity (Experiment 1; Gross, 2005) have asked children to make judgments about facial age using both male and female faces. Adult female faces, however, conserve more youthful features than do adult male faces (cf., Ishi, 2004;McKelvie, 1997); therefore, it may be more difficult for children to discriminate immaturity in stimulus sets that include female faces (especially those that are ambiguous as in these studies) than in sets of male-only faces.…”