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…
356 Citations
The Attractiveness of Nonface Averages: Implications for an Evolutionary Explanation of the Attractiveness of Average Faces
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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.
Infant preferences for attractive faces: a cognitive explanation.
- PsychologyDevelopmental psychology
- 1999
Four studies assessed a cognitive explanation for the development of attractiveness preferences: cognitive averaging and infant preferences for mathematically averaged faces, or prototypes, and suggest that infants' preferences for attractive faces can be explained by general information-processing mechanisms.
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- 2015
It is shown that for a continuum of faces that vary on a typicality-attractiveness dimension, trustworthiness judgments peak around the typical face, which suggests that face typicality is an important determinant of face evaluation.
Average faces are average faces
- Psychology
- 1999
Photographs of faces of young adult male and female Scots were measured on nineteen frontal dimensions. Measures in each dimension were converted to z-scores and summed for each face. For each sex,…
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.
Averageness, Exaggeration, and Facial Attractiveness
- Psychology
- 1996
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 &…
It’s not just average faces that are attractive: Computer-manipulated averageness makes birds, fish, and automobiles attractive
- PsychologyPsychonomic bulletin & review
- 2003
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.
- PsychologyAnnual review of psychology
- 2006
It is argued that both kinds of selection pressures may have shaped the authors' perceptions of facial beauty.
Why are average faces attractive? The effect of view and averageness on the attractiveness of female faces
- PsychologyPsychonomic bulletin & review
- 2004
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.
Are Average Facial Configurations Attractive Only Because of Their Symmetry?
- Psychology
- 1999
Several commentators have suggested that the attractiveness of average facial configurations could be due solely to associated changes in symmetry. If this symmetry hypothesis is correct, then…
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