The Attractiveness of Masked Faces Is Influenced by Race and Mask Attitudes

Dudarev, Veronica; Kamatani, Miki; Miyazaki, Yuki; Enns, James T.; Kawahara, Jun

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.864936

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 38 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For example, in a previous study, Cardiff University students perceived occluded faces, varied as to race, as being more attractive than unoccluded faces ( Hies and Lewis, 2022 ). In another study, Dudarev et al (2022) examined attractiveness ratings for masked White and Asian faces; they found that participants’ attitudes toward mask-wearing were strongly associated with political orientation, thus affecting the judgment of attractiveness regarding masked faces. Given the variation in the progression of COVID-19 spread, the reactions to mask-wearing people differ considerably among countries.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Occlusion of faces by sanitary masks improves facial attractiveness of other races

Kamatani

Miyazaki²,

Kawahara³

2023

Front. Psychol.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent studies provide mixed results regarding whether the perception of facial attractiveness is increased or decreased by partial occlusion with a sanitary mask. One set of studies demonstrated that occluding the bottom half of a face increased facial attractiveness. This effect is thought to occur because the occluded area is interpolated by an average facial representation that is perceived as attractive. However, several groups of studies showed that partial occlusion can increase or decrease perceived attractiveness depending on the attractiveness of the original (unoccluded) face, due to regression to the mean. To reconcile this inconsistency, we propose that the occluded area is interpolated not by an average facial representation, but by a template of moderate attractiveness, shaped by the distribution of each viewer’s experience. This hypothesis predicts an interaction between occlusion and the attractiveness of the original face so that occluded attractive faces are rated as less attractive, while occluded unattractive faces are rated as more attractive. To examine this hypothesis, the present study used attractiveness-rating tasks with mask-free versus masked faces in own-race and other-races categories. Viewers were familiar with own-race faces and unfamiliar with other-races faces. If moderate-attractiveness interpolation were the explanatory factor, the interaction between the occlusion and the attractiveness of the original face should be found only in the rating of own-race faces. Consistent with this hypothesis, the interaction between the occlusion and the attractiveness of the original faces was significant only for the own-race faces. Specifically, wearing a sanitary mask decreased the facial attractiveness of attractive faces in the own-race, while it increased the attractiveness regardless of the level of facial attractiveness in other-races. These findings suggest that the occluded area of own-race faces is interpolated by a facial template of moderate attractiveness. The other-races template could be developed using familiar exemplars such as celebrities. Thus, interpolation by such a template should result in elevated attractiveness relative to that by an own-race template. Accordingly, the apparent inconsistency in the literature regarding the effect of partial occlusion on physical attractiveness can be explained in terms of differences in the template involving interpolation of the occluded area.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Occlusion of faces by sanitary masks improves facial attractiveness of other races

Kamatani

Miyazaki²,

Kawahara³

2023

Front. Psychol.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This can be used to re-evaluate previous research into the mask advantage for attractiveness. Three studies were re-assessed: Kamatani et al ( 2023 ), Dudarev et al ( 2022 ), and Hies and Lewis ( 2022 ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This could potentially explain the differences that have been shown in the mask effect on attractiveness of faces when looked across races. Dudarev et al ( 2022 ), for example, found that adding a mask to White faces made them appear more attractive; however, adding a mask to Asian faces made them less attractive. This appears to support the contrasting findings from Miyazaki and Kawahara ( 2016 ) and Hies and Lewis ( 2022 ), suggesting that there is an interaction between race and masks, which could be causing the different findings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unveiling why race does not affect the mask effect on attractiveness: but gender and expression do

Hewer,

Lewis

2024

Cogn. Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Studies show that surgical face masks can have both positive and negative effects on attractiveness. Race has been implicated as a moderator of the size of this mask effect. Here, the moderating effects of expression, race and gender are explored. The mask effect was more positive for males than for females, for neutral faces than for smiling faces, and there were differences between the races. Further, the effect of unmasked attractiveness was partialled out for each image, which removed the race effects, but the gender and expression effects remained. It is suggested that racial differences previously observed in the mask effects are a consequence of differences in attractiveness of the faces sampled from those races. Re-analysis of previous research that showed race effects also demonstrates how they are better explained as attractiveness effects rather than race effects. This explanation can provide order to the different findings observed across the literature.

show abstract

“…Similarly, humans are aware of the social information that is leaked through their gaze direction, and make strategic decisions on what to look at, depending on whether or not they believe their gaze is visible to third parties (Dudarev et al. 2022 52 , see also Myllyneva and Hietanen 2015 53 ; Foulsham and Lock 2015 54 ; Hausfeld, von Hesler, and Goldlücke 2020 55 . In short, gaze is one of the basic predictors of immediate behavioural intent that humans use in interaction, including emotionally based intent (such as approach vs avoid, cf.…”

Section: Trustworthinessmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Adaptive Significance of Human Scleral Brightness. An Experimental Study

Wacewicz

Danel

Lewandowski

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Homogeneously depigmented sclerae have long been proposed to be uniquely human - an adaptation to enable cooperative behaviour by facilitating interpersonal coordination through gaze following. However, recent evidence has shown that deeply pigmented sclerae also afford gaze following if surrounding a bright iris. Furthermore, while current scleral depigmentation is clearly adaptive in modern humans, it is less clear how the evolutionarily intermediate stages of scleral pigmentation may have been adaptive. In sum, it is unclear why scleral depigmentation became the norm in humans, while not so in sister species like chimpanzees, or why some extant species (presumably as our ancestors did at some point) display intermediate degrees of pigmentation. We created realistic facial images of 20 individually distinct hominins with diverse facial morphologies, each face in the (i) humanlike bright sclera and (ii) generalised apelike dark sclera version. Participants in two online studies rated the bright-sclera hominins as younger, healthier, more attractive and trustworthy, but less aggressive than the dark-sclera hominins. Our results support the idea that the perceptual affordances of more depigmented sclerae increased perceived traits that fostered trust, increasing fitness for those individuals and resulting in depigmentation as a fixed trait in extant humans.

show abstract

The Attractiveness of Masked Faces Is Influenced by Race and Mask Attitudes

Cited by 12 publications

References 38 publications

Occlusion of faces by sanitary masks improves facial attractiveness of other races

Occlusion of faces by sanitary masks improves facial attractiveness of other races

Unveiling why race does not affect the mask effect on attractiveness: but gender and expression do

The Adaptive Significance of Human Scleral Brightness. An Experimental Study

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About