The neural substrate underlying the aesthetic processing of facial beauty and individual differences

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2015, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (3) : 574-579.

PDF(301 KB)
PDF(301 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2015, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (3) : 574-579.

The neural substrate underlying the aesthetic processing of facial beauty and individual differences

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Abstract

Physical attractiveness is an important characteristic in human social interactions. The experimental literature found that physically attractive people were perceived as more sociable, dominant, sexually warm, mentally healthy, intelligent, and socially skilled than physically unattractive people. Recently, some researchers have begun to explore the neural basis of facial beauty with the help of brain imaging techniques. The existing studies explored the neural basis of facial beauty in two ways. One was compared the brain activity of different aesthetic judgments tasks, the other was compare the brain activity of attractive faces with nonattractive faces. Neuroimaging studies found several brain areas to be differentially responsive to attractive as opposed to nonattractive faces. The studies of explicit aesthetic judgment of faces have found that attractive faces produced the activation of many brain regions, such as medial orbit-frontal cortex, nucleus accumbens, anterior cingulate cortex. When subjects judged facial beauty implicitly, neural activity in a widely distributed network involving the orbito-frontal cortex, nucleus accumbens and ventral occipital cortices correlated with the degree of facial attractiveness. The event-related potential studies suggested that attractive faces elicited an early posterior negativity (EPN) and a late positive potential (LPP). The ERN is related to facilitated selection of emotional information. The LPC might reflecting task-related evaluative processes. There are individual variations in facial beauty assessments. Some factors may influence the disagreement, such as gender, physiological cycle, and emotional state. There were some shortcomings with those studies, such as inconsistent judgment methods of facial beauty, inadequacy of ecological validity. Several domains could be pursued profitably in the studies of the neural substrate underlying facial beauty. Firstly, how the physical and social information of face are integrated to produce a global impression? Secondly, the neural mechanism of facial beauty is same or different with other rewards (e.g. food, drug)? Thirdly, facial beauty judgment may consist of many different processes; the different components of facial beauty judgment should be further decomposed. Fourthly, the time course of aesthetic processing of facial beauty should be further study. Lastly, as the perception of facial beauty is one process of face perception, we should construct a sound neural model about the processing of facial beauty in the future.

Key words

facial beauty, facial attractiveness, fMRI, ERP.

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The neural substrate underlying the aesthetic processing of facial beauty and individual differences[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2015, 38(3): 574-579
PDF(301 KB)

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