ABSTRACT

Judgments of facial attractiveness play an important role in social interactions. However, it still remains unclear why these judgments are malleable. The present study aimed to understand whether the retrieval of person knowledge leads to different judgments of attractiveness of the same face. Event-related potentials and learning-recognition tasks were used to investigate the effects of person knowledge on facial attractiveness. The results showed that compared with familiar faces that were matched with negative person knowledge, those matched with positive person knowledge were evaluated as more attractive and evoked a larger early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive complex (LPC). Additionally, positive similar faces had the same behavioral results and evoked large LPC, while unfamiliar faces did not have any significant effects. These results indicate that the effect of person knowledge on facial attractiveness occurs from early to late stage of facial attractiveness processing, and this effect could be generalized based on the similarity of the face structure, which occurred at the late stage. This mechanism may explain why individuals form different judgments of facial attractiveness.

摘要

面部吸引力的判断在社交互动中起着重要作用。然而，目前尚不清楚为什么这些判断具有可塑性。本研究旨在了解人物知识的检索是否会导致对同一面孔吸引力的不同判断。事件相关电位和学习识别任务被用来研究人物知识对面部吸引力的影响。结果表明，与与负面人物知识匹配的熟悉面孔相比，与正面人物知识匹配的面孔被评估为更具吸引力，并引起更大的早期后验负性 (EPN) 和晚期正性情结 (LPC)。此外，正面的相似面孔具有相同的行为结果并引起大 LPC，而陌生面孔则没有任何显着影响。这些结果表明，人物知识对面部吸引力的影响发生在面部吸引力处理的早期到后期，并且这种影响可以基于发生在后期的面部结构的相似性进行概括。这种机制可以解释为什么个体对面部吸引力形成不同的判断。