Journal
NEUROPSYCHOLOGY
Volume 23, Issue 2, Pages 135-143Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/a0014430
Keywords
beauty; neuroaesthetics; face processing; fMRI; reward
Categories
Funding
- Burroughs-Wellcome Career Development Award
- [RO1-DC008779]
- [K12 HD043245]
- [K08 MH 7 2926-01]
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What are the neural correlates of attractiveness? Using functional MRI (fMRI), the authors addressed this question in the specific context of the apprehension of faces. When subjects judged facial beauty explicitly, neural activity in a widely distributed network involving the ventral occipital, anterior insular, dorsal posterior parietal, inferior dorsolateral, and medial prefrontal cortices correlated parametrically with the degree of facial attractiveness. When subjects were not attending explicitly to attractiveness, but rather were judging facial identity, the ventral occipital region remained responsive to facial beauty. The authors propose that this region, which includes the fusiform face area (FFA), the lateral occipital cortex (LOC), and medially adjacent regions, is activated automatically by beauty and may serve as a neural trigger for pervasive effects of attractiveness in social interactions.
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