Data from: The boundary of holistic processing in the appraisal of facial attractiveness

Facial attractiveness is often studied on the basis of the internal facial features alone. This study investigated how this exclusion of the external features affects the perception of attractiveness. We studied the effects of two most commonly used methods of exclusion, where the shape of an occluding mask was defined by either the facial outline or an oval. Participants rated attractiveness of the same faces under these conditions. Results showed that faces were consistently rated more attractive when they were masked by an oval shape rather than by their outline (Experiment 1). Attractive faces were more strongly affected by this effect than were less attractive faces when participants were able to control the viewing time. However, unattractive faces benefited more from this effect when the same face stimuli were presented briefly for only 20 ms (Experiment 2). Further manipulation confirmed that the effect was mainly due to the occlusion of a larger area of the external features rather than the regular and symmetrical features of the oval shape (Experiment 3) or lacks contextual cues about the face boundary (Experiment 4). The effect was only relative to masked faces, with no advantage over unmasked faces (Experiment 5), and is likely a result of the interaction between the shape of a mask and the internal features of the face. This holistic effect in the appraisal of facial attractiveness is striking because the oval shape of the mask is not a part of the face but is the edge of an occluding object.面部吸引力的相关研究通常仅基于面部内部特征展开。本研究旨在探究这种排除外部特征的研究范式对吸引力感知的影响。我们考察了两种最常用的特征排除方法的效应：遮挡掩码（occluding mask）的形状分别由面部轮廓或椭圆形定义。参与者会在这两种条件下对同一批面部图像的吸引力进行评分。实验1结果显示，与面部轮廓遮挡掩码相比，椭圆形遮挡掩码下的面部始终被评为更具吸引力。当参与者可自主控制观看时长时，高吸引力面部比低吸引力面部受该效应的影响更为显著；而当面部刺激仅短暂呈现20毫秒时（实验2），低吸引力面部则从该效应中获益更多。进一步的操控实验证实，该效应主要源于对外部特征更大范围的遮挡，而非椭圆形规则对称的视觉特征（实验3），亦非缺失面部边界的背景线索（实验4）。实验5结果表明，该效应仅存在于经遮挡的面部中，相较于未遮挡的面部并无额外优势；该效应大概率源于掩码形状与面部内部特征之间的交互作用。这种用于面部吸引力评估的整体性效应颇为引人注目，因为椭圆形掩码并非面部本身的组成部分，而仅是遮挡物体的边缘。