Behavioural and Neural Responses to Facial Disfigurement

Hartung, Franziska; Jamrozik, Anja; Rosen, Miriam E.; Aguirre, Geoffrey K.; Sarwer, David B.; Chatterjee, Anjan

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-44408-8

Cited by 37 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…119,121 People attribute negative personal traits to others with facial disfigurement: they view them with less empathic concern, as sources of negative affect, as less emotionally stable, less conscientious, less happy, less intelligent, less trustworthy, and less popular. 121,122 Not surprisingly, most people expend great resources, both in terms of time and money, on improving how attractive they appear to others.…”

Section: Beauty and Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

The nature of beauty: behavior, cognition, and neurobiology

Skov

Nadal

2020

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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Beauty is commonly used to refer to positive evaluative appraisals that are uniquely human. Little is known, however, about what distinguishes beauty in terms of psychological function or neurobiological mechanisms. Our review describes recent empirical studies and synthesizes what behavioral, cognitive, and neuroscientific experiments have revealed about the nature of beauty. These findings suggest that beauty shares computational mechanisms with other forms of hedonic appraisal of sensory objects but is distinguished by specific conceptual expectations. Specifically, experiencing an object as pleasurable is a prerequisite for judging it to be beautiful; but to qualify as beautiful, an object must elicit especially high levels of pleasure and be matched to internal learned models of what counts as beautiful. We discuss how these empirical findings contradict several assumptions about beauty, including the notion that beauty is disinterested, and that it is specific to Homo sapiens.

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Section: Beauty and Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

The nature of beauty: behavior, cognition, and neurobiology

Skov

Nadal

2020

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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“…12 Indeed, facial anomalies and unattractive faces are treated as expressions of infectious disease that elicit disgust and avoidance in perceivers. [13][14][15] Moreover, expressions of negative bias in attitudes and behavior towards people with facial anomalies are predicted by disgust-sensitive brain responses to anomalous faces, [6][7][8] further evidence that disgust underpins reactions to THE ANOMALOUS-IS-BAD BIAS IN HADZA HUNTER GATHERERS 4 anomalous faces and that people erroneously infer pathogen threat from anomalies. 12 Disgust is a shared affective response that motivates avoidance to pathogen and moral threats, 16,17 and people may infer negative moral character from experiences of disgust to avoid immoral others.…”

mentioning

confidence: 89%

“…[2][3][4][5] On the other hand, US students and online workers have an "anomalous-is-bad" stereotype and are more likely to ascribe negative qualities to people with deviations from prototypically attractive features (e.g., craniofacial anomalies), especially negative attributions of moral character. [5][6][7][8] People may use craniofacial anomalies and other deviations from facial typicality to infer moral character because these anomalies are perceived as cues to infectious disease.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence against the "anomalous-is-bad" stereotype in Hadza hunter gatherers

Workman¹,

Smith²,

Apicella³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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People have an “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype whereby they make negative inferences about the moral character of people with craniofacial anomalies like scars. This stereotype is hypothesized to be a byproduct of adaptations for avoiding pathogens. However, evidence for the anomalous-is-bad stereotype comes from studies of European and North American populations; the byproduct hypothesis would predict universality of the stereotype. We presented 123 Hadza across ten camps pairs of morphed Hadza faces—each with one face altered to include a scar—and asked who they expected to be more moral and a better forager. Hadza with minimal exposure to other cultures chose at chance for both questions. Hadza with greater exposure to other cultures, however, expected the scarred face to be less moral and a better forager. These results suggest the anomalous-is-bad stereotype is culturally shared, providing evidence against a universal pathogen avoidance byproduct hypothesis.

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“…Though less directly relevant for scenes, studies investigating whether aesthetic appeal of faces is represented in regions of the face-selective network have reported mixed results, with some studies showing effects in fusiform face area (FFA; Kanwisher et al, 1997 ) ( Chatterjee et al, 2009 ; Pegors et al, 2015 ) and others not ( Vartanian et al, 2013a ; Hartung et al, 2019 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Visual Perception to Aesthetic Appeal: Brain Responses to Aesthetically Appealing Natural Landscape Movies

Isik

Vessel

2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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During aesthetically appealing visual experiences, visual content provides a basis for computation of affectively tinged representations of aesthetic value. How this happens in the brain is largely unexplored. Using engaging video clips of natural landscapes, we tested whether cortical regions that respond to perceptual aspects of an environment (e.g., spatial layout, object content and motion) were directly modulated by rated aesthetic appeal. Twenty-four participants watched a series of videos of natural landscapes while being scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and reported both continuous ratings of enjoyment (during the videos) and overall aesthetic judgments (after each video). Although landscape videos engaged a greater expanse of high-level visual cortex compared to that observed for images of landscapes, independently localized category-selective visual regions (e.g., scene-selective parahippocampal place area and motion-selective hMT+) were not significantly modulated by aesthetic appeal. Rather, a whole-brain analysis revealed modulations by aesthetic appeal in ventral (collateral sulcus) and lateral (middle occipital sulcus, posterior middle temporal gyrus) clusters that were adjacent to scene and motion selective regions. These findings suggest that aesthetic appeal per se is not represented in well-characterized feature- and category-selective regions of visual cortex. Rather, we propose that the observed activations reflect a local transformation from a feature-based visual representation to a representation of “elemental affect,” computed through information-processing mechanisms that detect deviations from an observer’s expectations. Furthermore, we found modulation by aesthetic appeal in subcortical reward structures but not in regions of the default-mode network (DMN) nor orbitofrontal cortex, and only weak evidence for associated changes in functional connectivity. In contrast to other visual aesthetic domains, aesthetically appealing interactions with natural landscapes may rely more heavily on comparisons between ongoing stimulation and well-formed representations of the natural world, and less on top-down processes for resolving ambiguities or assessing self-relevance.

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Behavioural and Neural Responses to Facial Disfigurement

Cited by 37 publications

References 62 publications

The nature of beauty: behavior, cognition, and neurobiology

The nature of beauty: behavior, cognition, and neurobiology

Evidence against the "anomalous-is-bad" stereotype in Hadza hunter gatherers

From Visual Perception to Aesthetic Appeal: Brain Responses to Aesthetically Appealing Natural Landscape Movies

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