The Effects of Facial Attractiveness and Familiarity on Facial Expression Recognition

Abstract

The classic theory of face perception holds that the invariant (e.g., identity and race) and variant (e.g., expression) dimensions of face information are independent of one another. Two separate neural systems are involved in face processing. However, the dynamic theory of face perception indicates that these two neural systems interact bidirectionally. Accordingly, by using the emotion categorization task and morph movies task, we investigated the influence of facial attractiveness on facial expression recognition and provided further evidence supporting the dynamic theory of face perception in both the static and dynamic contexts. In addition, this research used familiar celebrities (including actors, television personalities, politicians, and comedians) and explored the role of familiarity in face perception. In two experiments, the participants were asked to assess the expressions of faces with different levels of attractiveness and different levels of familiarity. We found that regardless of being in a static or dynamic face situation, happy expressions on attractive faces can be recognized more quickly, highlighting the advantage of happy expression recognition. Moreover, in static and dynamic familiar face situations, familiarity has a greater impact on expression recognition, and the influence of attraction on expression recognition may be weakened or even unaffected. Our results show that facial attractiveness influences the recognition of facial expressions in both static and dynamic contexts and highlight the importance of familiarity in face perception.

In the mood to be social: Affective state influences facial emotion recognition in healthy adults.

“…In addition, only four unique individuals are presented. Observers recognize emotional expressions more accurately when they are depicted by a familiar face (Li et al, 2019). FER therapies that train on subtle indicators such as facial microexpressions and feature movements can enhance emotion recognition accuracy and speed (Russo-Ponsaran et al, 2016).…”

Contrast Effect of Facial Attractiveness in Groups

“…Five hundred facial pictures were selected from the Internet; half of males and the other half of females, by querying the Baidu search engine (Li et al, 2019). The search term was "Chinese face images. "…”

“…Five hundred facial pictures were selected from the Internet; half of males and the other half of females, by querying the Baidu search engine ( Li et al, 2019 ). The search term was “Chinese face images.” We selected images where the subject directly faced the camera, and had both eyes directed toward it.…”

Neural responses to facial attractiveness in the judgments of moral goodness and moral beauty

“…Because attractiveness has effects in later stages whereby identity and affective qualities are extracted from faces after the early structural encoding stage of face perception (Hahn & Perrett, 2014). Calder and Young (2005) proposed that the invariant and variable features (geometrical con guration) of faces may be encoded by the same perceptual characterization system, followed by separation (Li et al, 2019).…”