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.

摘要： 外显和内隐的面孔审美加工的脑成像研究表明，美的面孔比不美的面孔导致眶额皮层、伏隔核、杏仁核等奖赏脑区更大的激活。脑电研究则发现了与面孔审美加工有关的早期负波和晚期正成分。面孔审美加工有关的脑区活动也受到性别、生理周期等个体因素的调节。未来的研究需要比较美的面孔与其它奖赏刺激加工的神经机制，探讨面孔审美加工的不同阶段及时间进程，在面孔知觉的框架下形成合理的面孔审美加工的神经模型。

关键词: 面孔美，面孔吸引力，功能磁共振成像，事件相关电位