An Electrophysiological Study Of Facial And Vocal Attractiveness Processing

The heart of loving beauty exists everywhere.Both men and women have a preference for physically attractive individuals,regardless of sex,age,and race.Attractiveness,as one kind of complex and socially relevant information,can be transmitted through a person's face and voice.Recently,an increasing number of studies have explored the cognitive mechanisms of facial and vocal attractiveness processing,and as well as the integration of visual and auditory channel information from the perspectives of language,emotion and identity information.However,it is still unclear about how people integrate attractiveness information from face and voice untill now.The present study,using event-related potentials(ERPs),aims to explore the temporal dynamics of automatic attractiveness information processing using the passively Oddball paradigm and cross-modal face-voice attractiveness integration with Stroop-like paradigm,respectively.In the first experiment,high attractive and low attractive faces/voices were presented as both standard and deviant stimuli in two distinct experimental blocks within a passively Oddball paradigm.Participants were instructed to complete the red nose or white noise detection task while ignoring the attractiveness information.In both facial and vocal sessions,in comparison with high/low attractive standards,high/low attractive deviants were found to elicit more negative effect in the pre-attentive stage(MMN effect)and more positive effect in the cognitive evaluation stage(P3 effect).In addition,low attractive voices elicited more negative MMN as compared to high attractive voices,and low attractive faces elicited more positive P3 as compared to high attractive faces.In the second experiment,using Stroop-like paradigm,participants were presented face-voice pairs expressing congruent or incongruent attractiveness information in which they should judge the attractiveness level of one modality while ignoring the other.Results indicated that low attractive face with high attractive voice elicited more positive P2 than high attractive face-voice in the facial judgment task.In the vocal judgment task,low attractive face-voice elicited more positive P2 than low attractive face with high attractive voice;low attractive face with high attractive voice elicited more negative N400 than high attractive face-voice;high attractive face-voice elicited more positive LPC than high attractive face with low attractive voice.Overall,the present study demonstrated that:1)People can automatically register the unattended regularities of attractiveness information and thus elicit MMN and P3 effect to deviants,indicating that there is automaticity in human attractiveness information processing;2)Low attractiveness information can be better detected and identified than high attractiveness information,and low attractive stimuli engage more attention resources as compared to high attractive stimuli;3)For human attractive information processing,there exists cross-modal integration effect between visual and auditory channels,mainly reflected by P2,N400,and LPC.The results may provide further our understanding of audio-visual integration of attractiveness;4)The multisensory perception of attractiveness may show visual dominance effect,and having a beautiful face are more likely to improve overall attractiveness level than having a charming voice.