The neural response to facial attractiveness.

What are the neural correlates of attractiveness? Using functional MRI (fMRI), the authors addressed this question in the specific context of the apprehension of faces. When subjects judged facial beauty explicitly, neural activity in a widely distributed network involving the ventral occipital, anterior insular, dorsal posterior parietal, inferior dorsolateral, and medial prefrontal cortices correlated parametrically with the degree of facial attractiveness. When subjects were not attending explicitly to attractiveness, but rather were judging facial identity, the ventral occipital region remained responsive to facial beauty. The authors propose that this region, which includes the fusiform face area (FFA), the lateral occipital cortex (LOC), and medially adjacent regions, is activated automatically by beauty and may serve as a neural trigger for pervasive effects of attractiveness in social interactions.

[1]  J. D. Smith,et al.  Aesthetic preference and syntactic prototypicality in music: 'Tis the gift to be simple , 1990, Cognition.

[2]  R. Bauer,et al.  Autonomic recognition of names and faces in prosopagnosia: A neuropsychological application of the guilty knowledge test , 1984, Neuropsychologia.

[3]  H. Wilson,et al.  fMRI evidence for the neural representation of faces , 2005, Nature Neuroscience.

[4]  P. Snaith,et al.  Anhedonia: a neglected symptom of psychopathology , 1993, Psychological Medicine.

[5]  M. E. Tubbs,et al.  Expectations, Impressions, and Judgments of Physically Attractive Students: A Review , 1992 .

[6]  G. Butterworth,et al.  Newborn infants prefer attractive faces , 1998 .

[7]  Randy Thornhill,et al.  Facial attractiveness , 1999, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[8]  James M. Donovan.  Facial Attractiveness : Evolutionary , Cognitive , and Social Perspectives , 2003 .

[9]  D. Yves von Cramon,et al.  Brain correlates of aesthetic judgment of beauty , 2006, NeuroImage.

[10]  Margo Wilson,et al.  Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future? , 2004, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[11]  Gustav Theodor Fechner,et al.  Elements of psychophysics , 1966 .

[12]  Alumit Ishai,et al.  Face Perception Is Modulated by Sexual Preference , 2006, Current Biology.

[13]  Lori A. Roggman,et al.  Facial Diversity and InfantPreferences for Attractive Faces , 1991 .

[14]  D. Perrett,et al.  Beauty in a smile: the role of medial orbitofrontal cortex in facial attractiveness , 2003, Neuropsychologia.

[15]  D. Hamermesh,et al.  Beauty and the Labor Market , 1993 .

[16]  Neil Frude,et al.  Influence of Children's Physical Attractiveness on Teacher Expectations , 1988 .

[17]  M. Bierly,et al.  Toward a profile of the female voter: Sex differences in perceived physical attractiveness and competence of political candidates , 1990 .

[18]  M. D’Esposito,et al.  Empirical Analyses of BOLD fMRI Statistics , 1997, NeuroImage.

[19]  Magnus Enquist,et al.  Symmetry, beauty and evolution , 1994, Nature.

[20]  G. Rhodes,et al.  The Attractiveness of Nonface Averages: Implications for an Evolutionary Explanation of the Attractiveness of Average Faces , 2000, Psychological science.

[21]  D. Ariely,et al.  Beautiful Faces Have Variable Reward Value fMRI and Behavioral Evidence , 2001, Neuron.

[22]  M. D’Esposito,et al.  Empirical analyses of BOLD fMRI statistics. I. Spatially unsmoothed data collected under null-hypothesis conditions. , 1997, NeuroImage.

[23]  E. Berscheid,et al.  What is beautiful is good. , 1972, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[24]  D. Symons,et al.  Précis of The evolution of human sexuality , 1980, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[25]  D. Perrett,et al.  Effects of sexual dimorphism on facial attractiveness , 1998, Nature.

[26]  C. Senior,et al.  Beauty in the Brain of the Beholder , 2003, Neuron.

[27]  K. Dion,et al.  Physical attractiveness and evaluation of children's transgressions. , 1972, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[28]  D. Perrett,et al.  Symmetry, sexual dimorphism in facial proportions and male facial attractiveness , 2001, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[29]  James M. Kilner,et al.  Brain systems for assessing facial attractiveness , 2007, Neuropsychologia.

[30]  K. Grammer,et al.  Darwinian aesthetics: sexual selection and the biology of beauty , 2003, Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

[31]  Physical Attractiveness Stereotypes and Students' Perceptions of College Professors , 1989 .

[32]  R. Dolan,et al.  Psychology: Reward value of attractiveness and gaze , 2001, Nature.

[33]  Leslie A. Zebrowitz,et al.  Facial Attractiveness: Evolutionary, Cognitive, and Social Perspectives , 2001 .

[34]  K. Grammer,et al.  Human (Homo sapiens) facial attractiveness and sexual selection: the role of symmetry and averageness. , 1994, Journal of comparative psychology.

[35]  Anjan Chatterjee,et al.  Prospects for a cognitive neuroscience of visual aesthetics , 2003 .

[36]  J. Langlois,et al.  Maxims or myths of beauty? A meta-analytic and theoretical review. , 2000, Psychological bulletin.

[37]  Colin Martindale,et al.  Priming, prototypicality, and preference. , 1988 .

[38]  M. D’Esposito,et al.  The Variability of Human, BOLD Hemodynamic Responses , 1998, NeuroImage.

[39]  R. Lerner,et al.  Physical Attractiveness and Psychosocial Functioning among Early Adolescents , 1991 .

[40]  A. Nakamura,et al.  Neuroanatomical correlates of the assessment of facial attractiveness , 1998, Neuroreport.

[41]  Doug Jones,et al.  Criteria of facial attractiveness in five populations , 1993, Human nature.

[42]  A. Damasio,et al.  Knowledge without awareness: an autonomic index of facial recognition by prosopagnosics. , 1985, Science.

[43]  Ingrid R Olson,et al.  Facial attractiveness is appraised in a glance. , 2005, Emotion.

[44]  Barry Gerhart,et al.  INTERVIEWER ASSESSMENTS OF APPLICANT “FIT”: AN EXPLORATORY INVESTIGATION , 1990 .

[45]  Eliot Slater.  Psychobiology , 1949 .

[46]  G. Rhodes,et al.  The Attractiveness of Average Faces: Cross-Cultural Evidence and Possible Biological Basis , 2002 .

[47]  L. Parsons,et al.  Reciprocal limbic-cortical function and negative mood: converging PET findings in depression and normal sadness. , 1999, The American journal of psychiatry.

[48]  Thomas E. Nichols,et al.  Nonparametric permutation tests for functional neuroimaging: A primer with examples , 2002, Human brain mapping.

[49]  Barbara J. Yanico,et al.  Effects of Counselor and Subject Race and Counselor Physical Attractiveness on Impressions and Expectations of a Female Counselor. , 1986 .

[50]  J. Gabrieli,et al.  The frontopolar cortex and human cognition: Evidence for a rostrocaudal hierarchical organization within the human prefrontal cortex , 2000, Psychobiology.

[51]  Oshin Vartanian,et al.  Neuroanatomical correlates of aesthetic preference for paintings , 2004, Neuroreport.

[52]  Alumit Ishai,et al.  Sex, beauty and the orbitofrontal cortex. , 2007, International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology.

[53]  M. D’Esposito,et al.  Stimulus inversion and the responses of face and object-sensitive cortical areas. , 1999, Neuroreport.

[54]  D. Perrett,et al.  Facial shape and judgements of female attractiveness , 1994, Nature.

[55]  G. Rhodes,et al.  Are you always on my mind? A review of how face perception and attention interact , 2007, Neuropsychologia.

[56]  V. Bowden,et al.  The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences , 1992 .

[57]  Michael R. Cunningham,et al.  Dimensions of facial physical attractiveness: The intersection of biology and culture. , 2002 .

[58]  H. Mayberg.  Limbic-cortical dysregulation: a proposed model of depression. , 1997, The Journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences.