According to a new study by scientists from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, published In Biological Psychology, the brain reacts differently to faces depending on how attractive they are. But these different reactions are only observed when looking at the faces of the sex you are sexually attracted to.
The study also found that responses to facial attractiveness occur in sequence, suggesting that our brains go through different processing steps when deciding how attractive a face is. Previous research has shown that attractive people tend to be viewed more positively and attribute various positive qualities such as intelligence, extroversion, and reliability. The neural basis of attractiveness perception is not fully understood, so the authors decided to bridge the gap.
The authors aimed to find out how the brain responds to attractive and unattractive faces and whether these responses vary according to the preferred gender of the participants. They recruited 63 healthy participants who viewed 252 facial images on a computer screen. Images were divided into attractive, medium and unattractive faces, with 40 images in each category. Participants rated the attractiveness of each face using a slider. Physiological measurements, including EEG activity, were recorded during the experiment.
“The processing of facial attractiveness seems to go through two separate steps. First, the characterization of faces is processed, the ones we find very attractive, and vice versa, causing a greater neural response than more neutral faces. Then comes valence processing: the most attractive faces cause the most neural activation. , the least attractive faces cause the least activation,” explain the authors.