Attractive Faces Are Only Average
@article{Langlois1990AttractiveFA, title={Attractive Faces Are Only Average}, author={Judith H. Langlois and Lori A Roggman}, journal={Psychological Science}, year={1990}, volume={1}, pages={115 - 121} }
Scientists and philosophers have searched for centuries for a parsimonious answer to the question of what constitutes beauty. We approached this problem from both an evolutionary and information-processing rationale and predicted that faces representing the average value of the population would be consistently judged as attractive. To evaluate this hypothesis, we digitized samples of male and female faces, mathematically averaged them, and had adults judge the attractiveness of both the…
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Beauty is in the ease of the beholding: A neurophysiological test of the averageness theory of facial attractiveness
- PsychologyCognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience
- 2014
Novel evidence is provided that faces are perceived as being attractive when they approximate a facial configuration close to the population average, and it is suggested that processing fluency underlies preferences for attractive faces.
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- Psychology
- 1991
In a recent article, Langlois and Roggman (1990) argue that “attractive faces are only average” and support this theory with composite faces produced by digitized image processing. While we agree…
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A strong relationship between averageness and attractiveness for dogs, wristwatches, and birds is found and the most parsimonious explanation is that humans have a general attraction to prototypical exemplars, and their attraction to average faces is a reflection of this more general attraction.
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- PsychologyPsychological science
- 2013
To the knowledge, no published study has indicated that averaging produced a face that was less attractive than the original faces from which it was generated.
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- Psychology
- 2005
Abstract Averaged composite faces, created by blending sets of faces, are surprisingly attractive. Here we consider whether a generalized mere exposure effect contributes to their appeal.…
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- 2007
The authors systematically test the averageness hypothesis in 5 experiments using both rating and visual adaptation paradigms and conclusively support the proposal that there are specific nonaverage characteristics that are particularly attractive.
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- PsychologyFront. Behav. Neurosci.
- 2017
The study suggests that the preference for averageness in faces does not generalize to non-human primates, and the average face likely plays a role in face recognition rather than in judgments of facial attractiveness.
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The hypothesis that people fill in the missing information with positive inferences when judging others’ facial beauty is tested, showing that—relative to complete photographs—participants judge faces in incomplete photographs as physically more attractive.
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- Psychology
- 1994
We reported in this journal (Langlois & Roggman, 1990) findings showing that attractive faces are those that represent the mathematical average of faces in a population These findings were intriguing…
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