Facial attractiveness is more associated with individual warmth than with competence: Behavioral and neural evidence

ABSTRACT

Individuals appear to infer others’ psychological characteristics according to facial attractiveness and these psychological characteristics can be classified into two categories in social cognition, that is, warmth and competence. However, which category of psychological characteristic is more associated with face attractiveness and its neural mechanisms have not been explored. To address this, participants were asked to judge others’ warmth and competence traits based on face attractiveness, while their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They also assessed the attractiveness of faces after scanning. Behavioral results showed that the correlation between face attractiveness and warmth ratings was significantly higher than that with competence ratings. fMRI results demonstrated that the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), temporoparietal junction (TPJ), lateral prefrontal cortex, and lateral temporal lobe were more involved in the warmth task. Moreover, attractiveness ratings were negatively correlated with activation of the dmPFC and TPJ only in the warmth task. Furthermore, the attractiveness ratings were negatively correlated with the defined dmPFC, region related to attractiveness judgment, only in the warmth task. In conclusion, people are more inclined to infer others’ warmth than competence characteristics from face attractiveness, that is, face attractiveness is more associated with warmth than with competence.

KEYWORDS:

• Face attractiveness
• warmth
• competence
• functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
• dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC)

Acknowledgments

Maoying Peng and Juan Yang contributed to the design of the study. Maoying Peng and Xiaolin Zhao contributed to data collection. Juan Yang and Mengxue Lan contributed to data analysis and participated in writing the paper. Chen Haopeng and Liu Yadong contributed to the analytical methods and discussion of the paper. All collaborators had the opportunity to contribute to the interpretation of the results and the drafting of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2022.2069152

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 31971019], Chongqing Social Science Foundation (2019YBSH088, 2021YC029), and Chongqing Research Program of Basic Research and Frontier Technology [grant number cstc2019jcyj-msxmX0016].