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Chasing Vanity
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Unattractive faces are more attractive when the bottom-half is masked, an effect that reverses when the top-half is concealed - Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications
Facial attractiveness in humans signals an individual’s genetic condition, underlying physiology and health status, serving as a cue to one’s mate value. The practice of wearing face masks for prevention of transmission of airborne infections may disrupt one’s ability to evaluate facial...
cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com
The Mask × Attractiveness Group interaction showed that for the low attractiveness group, participants rated faces with masks as more attractive compared to their unmasked faces; while in the high attractiveness group the ratings were not significantly different between masked and unmasked of attractive faces.
The Mask × Stimuli Sex interaction reflects that as females are more attractive than males overall and masks increase the attractiveness of both females and males, a masked male is perceived as attractive as an unmasked female, but a masked female is significantly more attractive than an unmasked male.
Collectively, across four experiments, our study reveals that facial masks increase the perceived attractiveness of less attractive faces, while they do not affect those that are highly attractive. This finding applies to young and old faces, and it extends to other methods of isolating the region of the upper face; but it does not apply to the situation when the lower half of the face is isolated. These findings suggest that a positivity-bias enhances the perception of unattractive faces when only the upper face is visible, a finding that may not extend to attractive faces because of the perceptual weight placed on their eye-region.
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