The Experience of Thinking by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Beauty-in-averageness

Galton (1878) first noted that photographically blending faces (in some cases, faces of criminals) increases their attractiveness. This phenomenon, replicated many times in the modern psychological literature, reflects the tendency for category exemplars to be more attractive as a function of their proximity to the category’s central tendency (Langlois & Roggman, 1990 ). Halberstadt ( 2006 ) documented the generality of the “beauty-in-averageness” effect, reporting a correlation between judged typicality and (independently) judged attractiveness in a wide variety of natural and artificial categories, from random dot patterns (r =.37) to birds (r =.50) to wristwatches (r =.65). In nearly all cases, category exemplars were liked better as a function of their similarity to the category prototype.

Empirically, morphing appears to produce faces that are more “face-like,” more similar to the perceiver’s image of the typical face, than the images used to create them. Busey (1998), for example, found that morphs are located closer to the center of multi-dimensional face space than their parents (as well as the emergence of other features such as youth and adiposity). Convergently, Rhodes and Tremewan (1996) found that faces that were shifted toward the center of face space (by distorting them in the direction of a blend of all faces in the study) were more attractive than faces shifted away from the center (Halberstadt & Rhodes, 2003, reported the analogous effect using line drawings of birds). Rhodes et al. (2003) found that the center of face space itself can be shifted (via exposure to systematically distorted exemplars), with predictable effects on attractiveness. In all, these data suggest that blended faces are more similar to the perceivers’ face prototype, which is itself a composite of the faces to which they have, over a lifetime, been exposed (cf. Potter & Corneille, 2008).

Just why prototypicality is attractive has been debated. In the case of faces, evolutionary psychologists have naturally invoked sexual selection, for example arguing that typicality is a proxy for various fitness-enhancing traits, such as heterozygosity or overall health (Symons, 1979; Thornhill & Gangestad, 1993). However, the demonstration of prototypicality effects in reproductively-irrelevant stimulus categories has led researchers to explore more general, proximate cognitive mechanisms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.