Locating attractiveness in the face space: faces are more attractive when closer to their group prototype
Open accessAbstract
Face attractiveness relates positively to the mathematical averageness of a face, but how close attractive faces of varying groups are to their own and to other-group prototypes in the face space remains unclear. In two studies, we modeled the locations of attractive and unattractive Caucasian, Asian, and African faces in participants' face space using multidimensional scaling analysis. In all three sets of faces, facial attractiveness significantly increased with the absolute proximity of a face to its group prototype. In the case of Caucasian and African faces (Study 1), facial attractiveness also tended to increase with the absolute proximity of a face to the other-group prototype. However, this association was at best marginal, and it became clearly nonsignificant when distance to the own-group prototype was controlled for. Thus, the present research provides original evidence that average features of faces contribute to increasing their attractiveness, but only when these features are average to the group to which a face belongs. The present research also offers further support to face space models of people's mental representations of faces.
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There is some evidence from the face perception literature that an average face, one closer to the population mean, is consistently rated as being attractive.
“There is some evidence from the face perception literature that an average face, one closer to the population mean, is consistently rated as being attractive (Rhodes et al., 2000; Valentine et al., 2004; Potter and Corneille, 2008).”
From The degree to which the cultural ideal is internalized predicts judgments of male and female physical attractiveness (2022) · cites this paper as Potter and Corneille, 2008
The Discussion reports that faces with more average features were rated as more attractive across the face sets studied. But it explicitly limits the relationship to proximity to each face’s own-group prototype, not a general population mean; it also notes that only Caucasian participants were studied. (LLM, conf=0.87)
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- Authors
- POTTER, T., & CORNEILLE, O.
- Affiliations
- Fund for Scientific Research (BE)
- UCLouvain (BE)
- Corresponding author
- POTTER, T.
- ORCID
- CORNEILLE, O.
- Venue
- Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
- Published
- 2008-06-01
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 615-622
- ISSN
- 1069-9384 (ISSN-L)
- 1531-5320
- OpenAlex
- W2014324648
- Cited by
- 58
- References
- 31
- Citations by year
- 2025: 2 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 4 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 5
- FWCI
- 4.08
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Digital Access to Libraries (Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), l'Université de Namur (UNamur) and the Université Saint-Louis (USL-B)) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Université Catholique de Louvain
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Face recognition and analysis
- Keywords
- facial attractiveness, face space, facial averageness, face perception
- MeSH terms
- Beauty, Face, Female, Humans, Male, Social Desirability, Space Perception
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