A recent study from researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands explored how the brain responds to faces as a function of attractiveness and the viewer’s own sexual orientation. The researchers used a set of facial images and measured brain activity to see if attractive faces trigger different neural responses than less attractive ones, and whether these responses depend on the gender to which the viewer is attracted. These findings contribute to our understanding of how social impressions form at the neural level and why beauty can influence first impressions.
The study also suggests that the brain processes facial attractiveness in a sequence. First, the visual system extracts basic facial features and assigns a perceived attractiveness level. Faces rated as highly attractive tend to evoke stronger neural responses during this initial characterization stage, compared with neutral or unattractive faces. In a second stage, the brain integrates this information with affective or valence processing, where the most attractive faces generate greater neural activation than less attractive faces. This staged processing pattern provides evidence that admiration for beauty involves multiple steps in the brain rather than a single rapid judgment. Historically, researchers have documented a positive bias toward attractive individuals, associating traits such as intelligence, sociability, and reliability with beauty. The current work aims to connect those social perceptions with underlying neural activity and to determine how the brain’s response varies with the viewer’s preferred gender.
In their experiment, the researchers recruited 63 healthy adults who viewed 252 facial images on a computer screen. Each image was categorized into attractive, medium, or unattractive groups, with 40 images in each category. Participants used a slider to rate the attractiveness of each face, providing a subjective measure that could be correlated with brain signals. Throughout the session, physiological data were collected, including electroencephalography (EEG), to capture real-time neural responses as participants evaluated each image.
The results indicate a two-phase model of facial attractiveness processing. In the first phase, the brain distinguishes and characterizes faces based on their attractiveness, with very attractive faces eliciting larger neural responses than neutral or unattractive faces. The second phase involves valence processing, where the degree of attractiveness modulates the level of neural activation, producing the strongest responses to the most attractive faces and the weakest responses to the least attractive ones. These findings help explain why attractive faces can evoke stronger emotional and social judgments and how these judgments align with observable neural patterns. They also align with broader research showing that attractiveness can be linked to positive social attributions, while also highlighting the importance of considering individual differences in viewer preferences when studying social perception. The study contributes to the growing body of knowledge about the neural underpinnings of aesthetic evaluation and social cognition, offering a clearer picture of how the brain orchestrates rapid, judgment-like processes about others based on facial appearance.
Overall, the research emphasizes that facial attractiveness is not a single, simple signal but a cascade of neural events that begin with perceptual assessment and culminate in affective interpretation. By examining how these processes unfold and how they differ depending on who is judging, scientists can better understand the mechanisms behind everyday social judgments and their potential impact on behavior in real-world settings.
— A citation: Tilburg University, Biological Psychology, study on neural responses to facial attractiveness (citation).