Perception of facial attractiveness requires some attentional resources: implications for the “automaticity” of psychological adaptations

Androstadienone’s influence on the perception of facial and vocal attractiveness is not sex specific

“…In our study, response time depended on the amount of attentional resources put into the processing of the emotional stimulus or attending to it and into outputting a response to this stimulus (Yiend, 2010). Moreover, determining whether a face is attractive or not requires attentional resources (Jung et al, 2012). According to the literature cited earlier, it is likely that androstadienone delayed decision making because of greater attention capture by -and thus longer examination time of -the perceptual characteristics of the faces/voices when they were processed in the working memory.…”

“…Although androstadienone should have no effect, or a negative effect, on women's attractiveness, because femininitynot masculinity -tends to drive preferences in this case (Collins and Missing, 2003;Fraccaro et al, 2010), male raters may be able to infer other men's quality from the odor of androstadienone associated with them (Huoviala and Rantala, 2013) and therefore rate them as more attractive. Because of the cost of attractiveness evaluations in terms of attentional resources (Jung et al, 2012) and the decrease in processing speed of faces with increasing attractiveness (Kranz and Ishai, 2006), the time needed to categorize the stimuli as attractive or not would be expected to follow attractiveness changes, i.e., to increase if attractiveness increases in the presence of androstadienone and to decrease if attractiveness decreases. In the second hypothesis (more general), androstadienone would have an influence that is not sex specific, but instead specifically directed to emotionally relevant information (Hummer and McClintock, 2009).…”

Automatic identification of familiar faces

“…Previous PRP studies using facial stimuli suggest that other facial information processes with a seemingly similar level of complexity such as facial emotion perception (Tomasik et al, 2009; but see also Shaw et al, 2011) or facial attractiveness judgments (Jung et al, 2012) are not automatic. Those experiments produced additive interactions between SOA and difficulty, not underadditive.…”

“…Word reading is only partially automatic, except perhaps for older readers (Lien et al 2006) and especially skilled younger readers . Recent PRP studies using facial stimuli also suggested that facial emotion perception (Tomasik et al, 2009; but see also Shaw, Lien, Ruthruff, & Allen, 2011) and facial attractiveness judgments (Jung et al, 2012) are not automatic. The goal of Experiment 2, therefore, was to replicate Experiment 1 using facial pictures of a different set of celebrities (Keanu Reeves, Leonard DiCaprio, and Matthew McConaughey) and to see whether the findings would generalize.…”

“…For example, automaticity has been reported with relatively simple tasks such as letter identification (Pashler & Johnston, 1989), and word reading (at least, in older adults and better younger readers; Ruthruff, Allen, Lien, & Grabbe, 2008). Meanwhile, nonautomaticity has been reported for many other mental processes, such as mental rotation (Ruthruff, Miller, & Lachmann, 1995), box-width judgments (Johnston & McCann, 2006), reading words aloud (O'Malley, Reynolds, Stolz, & Besner, 2008), depressing a vehicle's brake pedal (Levy, Pashler, & Boer, 2006), facial emotion perception (Tomasik, Ruthruff, Allen, & Lien, 2009), and facial attractiveness judgments (Jung, Ruthruff, Tybur, Gaspelin, & Miller, 2012).…”