Will Obscurity Makes A Face Beautiful?

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of altered processing fluency on face attractiveness evaluation.Four empirical studies were designed to examine this question.In experiments 1 and 2,the enhanced/blurred processing fluency of faces was changed,and the results showed that whether the processing fluency was improved or decreased,the attractiveness evaluation of faces was significantly decreased.Moreover,the trends of highly attractive and less attractive faces were consistent.In experiment 3,the face frequency information was changed to reduce the processing fluency,and it was found that the attractiveness score of low-frequency highly attractive faces was significantly reduced when compared with original faces,while that of low-attractive faces was not significantly changed.In experiment 4,the time was added as an independent variable,and the consistent results were obtained.The attractiveness score of the high-attraction low-frequency faces was significantly lower than that of the original faces,while the low-attraction faces had no significant change,while the effect of time on the face attractiveness evaluation was not significant.The results of current research show that :(1)the reduction of processing fluency through fuzzy faces will reduce the evaluation of face attractiveness,which conforms to the processing fluency hypothesis;(2)enhance the processing fluency by enhancing the face and reduce the evaluation of face attractiveness,which does not conform to the processing fluency hypothesis.(3)“Hazy Beauty” existed only when female subjects rated fuzzy faces with low attractiveness.(4)The evaluation of facial attractiveness by processing fluency is not performed by holistic processing or feature processing;(5)the processing fluency was reduced by reducing the presentation time,and there was no significant change in the evaluation of face attractiveness.