Facial attractiveness biases the perception of eye contact

Abstract

Attractive faces are appealing: We like to look at them, and we like to be looked at by them. We presented attractive and unattractive smiling and neutral faces containing identical eye regions with different gaze directions. Participants judged whether or not a face looked directly at them. Overall, attractive faces increased participants' tendency to perceive eye contact, consistent with a self-referential positivity bias. However, attractiveness effects were modulated by facial expression and gender: For female faces, observers more likely perceived eye contact in attractive than unattractive faces, independent of expression. For male faces, attractiveness effects were limited to neutral expressions and were absent in smiling faces. A signal detection analysis elucidated a systematic pattern in which (a) smiling faces, but not highly attractive faces, reduced sensitivity in gaze perception overall, and (b) attractiveness had a more consistent impact on bias than sensitivity measures. We conclude that combined influences of attractiveness, expression, and gender determine the formation of an overall impression when deciding which individual's interest in oneself may be beneficial and should be reciprocated.

Keywords:

• Face perception
• Eye gaze
• Attractiveness
• Emotional expression
• Gender

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a grant from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena to N.K. We would like to thank Dirk Wentura, Lauri Nummenmaa, and one anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. We are also grateful to Holger Wiese for his advice in questions of data analysis. Finally, we would like to thank Andrea Kowallik, Maria Rohmann, and Sina Schneider for their help with the control experiment.

Notes

¹ Nine raters not taking part in the main experiment were asked to report any possible “strange” pictures, to ensure that editing had preserved a natural appearance of the faces. No rater reported any irregularities in any face.

² An initial analysis including a between-subject factor observer gender did not reveal any significant main effect or interactions involving this factor, which we therefore disregard in the present report.

³ We acknowledge the suggestion for this analysis by the action editor and by one anonymous reviewer.

⁴ We also assessed participants' sexual orientation. Three did not specify their orientation, and three reported bisexual orientation. No main effects or interactions including preferred gender emerged in an analysis of the remaining 35 participants.