What Is Average and What Is Not Average About Attractive Faces?

@article{Langlois1994WhatIA,
  title={What Is Average and What Is Not Average About Attractive Faces?},
  author={Judith H. Langlois and Lori A Roggman and Lisa Musselman},
  journal={Psychological Science},
  year={1994},
  volume={5},
  pages={214 - 220}
}
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 because they provided a parsimonious definition of facial attractiveness and because they supported explanations of attractiveness from the point of view of both evolutionary and cognitive-prototype theory Since our 1990 report, several alternative explanations of our findings have been offered In… 
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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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Langlois and her colleagues reported in this journal that composite faces are more attractive than the component faces used to create them, and conjectured that averageness is attractive (Langlois &…
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The results suggest that at least two mechanisms contribute to the attractiveness of average exemplars: a general preference for familiar stimuli, which contributes to the appeal of averageness in all three categories, and a preference for features signaling genetic quality in living organisms, including conspecifics.
The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty.
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    Annual review of psychology
  • 2006
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It is argued that both kinds of selection pressures may have shaped the authors' perceptions of facial beauty.
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The effect of averageness is independent of any effect of symmetry on the perceived attractiveness of female faces, and is significantly stronger for full-face views.
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References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 52 REFERENCES
Article Commentary: Averaged Faces Are Attractive, but Very Attractive Faces Are Not Average
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…
Attractive Faces Are Only Average
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…
Aesthetic perception of faces during infancy
This study explores the visual preferences of young infants for faces that differ with respect to their perceived attractiveness, as evaluated by adult raters. Black-and-white slides were presented…
Article Commentary: On the Difficulty of Averaging Faces: Comments on Langlois and Roggman
In this journal, Langlois and Roggman (1990) argued that faces with morphologically normal features will be seen as attractive by conspecifics. In humans, this process takes the following form: The…
Article Commentary: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Reply to “On the Difficulty of Averaging Faces”
Pittenger (PS, 1991, 2, 351-353) criticizes three characteristics of our technique of mathematically averaging faces to produce an attractive composite face (Langlois & Roggman, 1990). He claims that…
Facial Diversity and InfantPreferences for Attractive Faces
Three studies examined infant preferences for attractive faces in four types of faces: White adult male and female faces, Black adult female faces, and infant faces. Infants viewed pairs of faces,…
Memory for lateral asymmetries in well-known faces: Evidence for configural information in memory representations of Faces
TLDR
The Results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that Configural Information About the Left-Right Organization of Faces Is Represented In Memory.
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TLDR
The results suggest that faces have both component and configural properties and lend themselves to different processing strategies that are not mutually exclusive and can unfold simultaneously.
The face-detection effect: Configuration enhances detection
TLDR
It is found that a picture of a face is more easily detected than is a pattern of arbitrarily rearranged facial features, and this face-detection effect (FDE) can be produced with line drawings and with photocopies of a pictureof a face.
Configurational Information in Face Perception
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The findings demonstrate the importance of configurational information in face perception, and that configurations are only properly perceived in upright faces.
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