Attractiveness

As an amateur portrait photographer, I love to capture every moment of beauty, but I am more curious about how people perceive and appreciate beauty. Therefore, my previous research mainly focuses on how people perceive facial attractiveness.

Face, as a high-level visual stimulus, has an irreplaceable role in interpersonal interaction. In particular, facial attractiveness influences major social decisions in our daily life, such as mate selection, hiring judgment, and social exchange. For a long time, researchers have been exploring the perception of single static facial attractivenessh. However, regarding the representation of facial attractiveness and the attractiveness enhancement effect of dynamic faces and group faces, very little is known about the underlying mechanisms.

Normality representation of facial attractiveness.

Although symmetry, averageness, and sexual dimorphism are usually considered important to facial attractiveness, there are mixed findings regarding whether and how symmetry influences facial attractiveness.

We put forward a new viewpoint that symmetry increases facial attractiveness only when it improves facial normality to explain the inconsistency of previous studies (Zheng et al., 2021). Using structural equation model, we found that normality but not symmetry predicted facial attractiveness. Symmetry may increase facial attractiveness by increasing the perceived symmetry and then improving perceived normality.

Enhancement effect of dynamic faces

What makes a creation attract the beholders?

Socrates declared that the faithful imitation of the various affections of the body action imparts a particular pleasure to the beholder, and this imitation brings the statues to life (Xenophon, 2004/2013).

Looking back at the history of aesthetics, beauty seems to go beyond appearance to the spirit behind appearance, shown by portraying body movements (Eco, 2004/2007).

I am interested in this beauty of dynamism and its underlying mechanism, and I am currently focusing on the role of vitality (Zheng & Zhou, 2021) and attention in it (see Zhou et al., 2022 for the conceptual framework).

Enhancement effect of group faces

Individuals are more attractive in a group than in isolation (Walker & Vul, 2014) , which reflects the influence of the social context on facial attractiveness.

However, the social groups in the real world are diverse, with different genders, ages, races, etc. There are various relations between these social groups. Therefore, I am curious about how the context with multiple social groups and the triadic relations of the observer, target, and context influence attractiveness perception.