What Is Average and What Is Not Average About Attractive Faces?

Langlois, Judith H.; Roggman, Lori A.; Musselman, Lisa

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1994.tb00503.x

Cited by 320 publications

(207 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…According to cognitive averaging theory, attractive faces are closer to the population average in configuration and are thus perceived as more familiar, typical, and "face-like" than faces that deviate (e.g., unattractive faces) from the average configuration of a population of faces (see Langlois & Roggman, 1990;Langlois, Roggman & Musselman, 1994;Rubenstein, Kalakanis & Langlois, 1999;Rubenstein, Langlois, & Roggman, 2002). Indeed, faces that are rated as more typical are categorized as faces more quickly than those rated as less typical by both children and adults (Johnston & Ellis, 1995) and attractiveness facilitates the sex classification of faces by children and adults (Hoss, Ramsey, Griffin, & Langlois, in press).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stereotype Directionality and Attractiveness Stereotyping: Is Beauty Good or is Ugly Bad?

Griffin¹,

Langlois²

2006

Social Cognition

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Dion, Berscheid, and Walster (1972), in their seminal article, labeled the attribution of positive characteristics to attractive people the "beauty-is-good" stereotype. The stereotyping literature since then provides extensive evidence for the differential judgment and treatment of attractive versus unattractive people, but does not indicate whether it is an advantage to be attractive or a disadvantage to be unattractive. Two studies investigated the direction of attractiveness stereotyping by comparing judgments of positive and negative attributes for medium vs. low and medium vs. high attractive faces. Taken together, results for adults (Experiment 1) and children (Experiment 2) suggest that most often, unattractiveness is a disadvantage, consistent with negativity bias (e.g., Rozin & Royzman, 2001) but contrary to the "beauty-is-good" aphorism.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stereotype Directionality and Attractiveness Stereotyping: Is Beauty Good or is Ugly Bad?

Griffin¹,

Langlois²

2006

Social Cognition

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213

163

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“…Since the majority of past research in the field has characterised the perception and effects of beauty or appearance in terms of attractiveness, we asked participants to rate faces along two dimensions: age and attractiveness, instead of fatigue (Berry 1991;Langlois et al 1994). While Nguyen et al may have predicted that perception of fatigue would be closely related to age judgments, our methodological changes provide a bridge to the literature on attractiveness, which along with age is the main dimension which people seek to alter with cosmetic surgery.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age and Beauty are in the Eye of the Beholder

2012

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Abstract. How "old" and "attractive" an individual appears has increasingly become an individual concern leading to the utilisation of various cosmetic surgical procedures aimed at enhancing appearance. Using eyetracking, in the present study we aimed to investigate how individuals perceive age and attractiveness of younger and older faces and what "bottom-up" facial cues are used in this process. One hundred and twenty eight digital images of neutral faces of ages ranging from 20 to 89 years were paired and presented to subjects who judged age and attractiveness levels while having their eye movements recorded. There was an effect of face attractiveness on age-rating accuracy, with attractive faces being rated younger than their true age. Similarly, stimulus age affected attractiveness ratings, with younger faces being perceived as more attractive. Judgments of age and attractiveness were tightly linked to fixations on the eye region, along with the nose and mouth. It is thus likely that cosmetic surgical procedures targeted at the eyes, nose, and mouth may be most efficacious at enhancing one's physical appearance.

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“…The relationship between perceived attractiveness and computationally defined facial averages has been debated vigorously in a number of recent papers (Alley & Cunningham, 1991;Langlois & Roggman, 1990;Langlois, Roggman, & Mussleman, 1994;Langlois, Roggman, Mussleman, & Acton, 1991;Pittenger, 1991). Langlois and Roggman (1990) found that composite faces, created by arithmetically averaging the images of several male or female faces, were judged to be more attractive than almost any single male or female face.…”

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confidence: 99%

The perception of face gender: The role of stimulus structure in recognition and classification

et al. 1998

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The perception of face gender was examined in the context of extending "face space" models of human face representations to include the perceptual categories defined by male and female faces. We collected data on the recognizability, gender classifiability (reaction time to classify a face as male/female), attractiveness, and masculinity/femininity of individual male and female faces. Factor analyses applied separately to the data for male and female faces yielded the following results. First, for both male and female faces, the recognizability and gender classifiability of faces were independent-a result inconsistent with the hypothesis that both recognizability and gender classifiability depend on a face's "distance" from the subcategory gender prototype. Instead, caricatured aspects of gender (femininity/masculinity ratings) related to the gender classifiability of the faces. Second, facial attractiveness related inversely to face recognizability for male, but not for female, faces-a result that resolves inconsistencies in previous studies. Third, attractiveness and femininity for female faces were nearly equivalent, but attractiveness and masculinity for male faces were not equivalent. Finally,we applied principal component analysis to the pixel-coded face images with the aim of extracting measures related to the gender classifiability and recognizability of individual faces. We incorporated these model-derived measures into the factor analysis with the human rating and performance measures. This combined analysis indicated that face recognizability is related to the distinctiveness of a face with respect to its gender subcategory prototype. Additionally, the gender classifiability offaces related to at least one caricatured aspect of face gender.Human faces provide us with a plethora of information that is valuable and necessary for social interaction. When we encounter a face, we can quickly and efficiently decide whether it is one we know. For faces of persons we know, we can often retrieve semantic and identity information about the person. Additionally, from both familiar and unfamiliar faces we can make judgments about the gender, approximate age, and race of the person. The information we use to accomplish these latter judgments has been referred to by Bruce and Young (1986) in their model offace processing as "visually derived semantic" informaThis work was supported in part by NIMH Grant MH5 I 765-02 to A.J.O. Thanks are due to June Chance and Al Goldstein for providing the faces used in the present experiments and simulations and to James

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What Is Average and What Is Not Average About Attractive Faces?

Cited by 320 publications

References 38 publications

Stereotype Directionality and Attractiveness Stereotyping: Is Beauty Good or is Ugly Bad?

Stereotype Directionality and Attractiveness Stereotyping: Is Beauty Good or is Ugly Bad?

Age and Beauty are in the Eye of the Beholder

The perception of face gender: The role of stimulus structure in recognition and classification

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