Locating attractiveness in the face space: Faces are more attractive when closer to their group prototype

Abstract

Previous research on faces has shown a relation between facial attractiveness and the mathematical averageness of a face (e.g., Langlois & Roggman, 1990). Rhodes, Harwood, Yoshikawa, Nishitani, and McLean (2002) also showed that people from different social groups (e.g., Caucasian and Asian) show high intergroup correlations in attractiveness ratings of the same mathematically average faces, regardless of the group memberships of the raters or of the faces being rated. Yet, relatively little is known about how people's mental representations of faces relate to the faces' attractiveness. In particular, no research to date has examined how faces that vary in attractiveness are represented relative to mathematical averages (i.e., to prototypes) for various ethnic groups, a gap that the present research was designed to address.One popular framework used to understand how faces are perceived, encoded, and retrieved is the face space (Lewis, 2004;Valentine, 1991). This space is akin to a mental "map" in which each dimension is normally distributed and holds information necessary to remembering and recognizing a face. Busey (1998) showed that the face space can be modeled adequately using multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis. He used faces of bald men and their morphs in a similarity judgment task involving all possible combinations of faces. The morphs appeared more typical than their parent faces and were found closer to the center, in line with predictions made by the face space model. The morphs were also found to be less typical than predicted, consistent with recent research on attractor field models that has shown

Preference for facial averageness: Evidence for a common mechanism in human and macaque infants

“…Furthermore, typical faces are judged more attractive than distinctive faces3233, and a meta-analysis has shown that the appeal of averageness is not restricted to face race or sex34, although it might be linked with visual experience35.…”

Limitations of traditional morphometrics in research on the attractiveness of faces

“…The other shifts are in the direction that discriminates humans from ancestral hominids, and aesthetic preferences lying along the ancestral-to-derived discriminant have been documented in both the face and the body (Magro, 1997(Magro, , 1999. This brings us to the interpretation of the literature that documents a shift toward European norms in attractive nonEuropean faces and is, therefore, discordant with Potter and Corneille (2008). A convenient explanation is the economic domination of Western societies and the strong global presence of Western culture.…”

“…However, Rhodes et al (2005) could not do this and, hence, did not address the extent to which the higher attractiveness of Eurasian faces resulted from variation along the discriminant distinguishing European from Asian faces, rather than from other shape components. Potter and Corneille (2008) used the "rand lock" feature in FaceGen, which keeps dimensions that are key to a group constant, to generate random faces for each population. It is questionable how well FaceGen achieves this.…”

“…Potter and Corneille (2008) generated faces using FaceGen Modeller (www.facegen.com). FaceGen is mainly used by game developers.…”

The Riddle of Attractiveness: Looking for an ‘Aesthetic Sense’ Within the Hedonic Mind of the Beholders

“…Moving a facial image closer to the average increases its attractiveness (Langlois and Roggman 1990). This "beauty-in-averageness effect" only works, however, when the features of the faces are average of the group to which a face belongs (Potter and Corneille 2008).…”