It’s What You Got And How You Use It – Studying Facial Attractiveness And Emotional Expression

It’s What You Got And How You Use It – Studying Facial Attractiveness And Emotional Expression
Christopher Philip

Edward Morrison, Paul Morris and Kim Bard Department of Psychology, Centre for Comparative and Evolutionary Psychology, University of Portsmouth have found evidence that while facial attractiveness is important, what you do with that face also matters.

Their study, had subjects rate images on attractiveness of models portrayed in seven facial expressions including happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust and neutral. In total 14 male faces and 16 female produced a set of 210 photographs as study materials.

Subjects were shown 30 images in total and never more than one image with the same model. The subjects were asked to rate the model on a scale from 1-7; from very unattractive to very attractive.

The results showed that “identity” – the actual face, not it’s emotion had a 2.2 times stronger effect on attractiveness than did facial expressions. This was the same for both men and women.

This suggests that the face has some inherent attractiveness that just isn’t affected by the message that the face conveys.

However, happiness and the neutral expression was rated the highest on attractiveness followed by sadness, surprised, fear, anger and lastly, disgust.

“Our data suggest that facial expressions of emotion can affect judgments of attractiveness, and that these effects are similar in male and female faces,” say the researchers.

They continue, “A happy expression signals positive mood and intent, implying that it is worthwhile interacting socially with someone who is smiling at you.” In other words, interacting with someone who is smiling is likely to be rewarded over someone who is, say, disgusted.

The person showing disgust, on the other hand, is someone you might want to, at least temporarily, avoid. Should the expression persist, might indicate someone whom you expect to look poorly upon you – find you repulsive or unattractive – thus someone to avoid.

However, that the face is relatively stable across various emotional expressions, suggests that it is a fixed cue.

The researchers point out that small differences between the faces, say the disgust versus happiness expression (the largest difference) shows enough of an effect to lift a face from the 11th most attractive to the 7th, or likewise, decrease it to the 26th. These, it turns out, are not exactly trivial differences, but are not enough to overcome the differences between two different people and their actual facial morphology.

Conclusion

While the results might seem intuitive – facial attractiveness doesn’t change with facial expressions – much – however, they do play some lesser role.

In other words, a happy or neutral facial expression, sure beats disgust and anger. While facial expressions can’t beat out the differences between two faces from two different people, they can boost the effects of one face when rated against it’s self.

While the effect is small, a caring, happy, “pro-social faces” beats a negative faces with respect to facial attractiveness. These results are somewhat intuitive but at the same time surprising and clearly demonstrates that a face is more than just what you got, but also how you use it.

Image Credit: Rachel Carter

Resources

Edward R. Morrison; Paul H. Morris and Kim A. Bard. The Stability of Facial Attractiveness: Is It What You’ve Got or What You Do with It? Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. 2019; 37:59–67 DOI 10.1007/s10919-013-0145-1.