Differences Between Conscious And Subliminal Processing Of Facial Attractiveness

People often have a preference for attractive faces,believing that "beauty is good",which reflects the role of facial attractiveness.In recent years,psychologists have carried out a lot of research on the cognitive processing of facial attractiveness and its influencing factors.However,so far,only a few studies have examined the subliminal processing of facial attractiveness by using behavioral indicators,and the neural mechanisms behind subliminal processing are unclear.The present study,event related brain potential(ERP)technology was used to investigate the neural mechanisms of subliminal processing of facial attractiveness with the help of backward masking(BM)paradigm and continuous flash suppression(CFS)paradigm respectively,and the neural activities induced by facial attractiveness were compared under both conscious and subliminal conditions.In the first experiment,we asked the participants to judge facial attractiveness under conscious condition.Under the subliminal condition,BM paradigm was used to present the face for 10 ms first,and then to present the masked stimulus,the participants were asked to guess the facial attractiveness.In the second experiment,we asked the participants to judge face gender under conscious condition.Under subliminal condition,the CFS paradigm was used to present the Mondrian patterns in the dominant eye of the participants,while the non-dominant eye presented the face,and the participants were asked to observe the contrast variation of the Mondrian patterns(In fact,we wanted to examine whether the participants can process facial attractiveness under subliminal condition).In the first experiment,results showed that in conscious condition,attractive female faces elicited a larger late positive component(LPC)than unattractive female faces.Moreover,the attractive faces elicited a larger LPC than unattractive faces at the left sites.However,no effect on facial attractiveness was found in the subliminal condition.In the second experiment,results showed that in conscious condition,attractive male faces elicited a larger N170 than unattractive male faces at left and middle sites,and attractive female faces elicited a larger N170 than unattractive female faces at right and middle sites.Moreover,attractive male faces elicited a larger P2 than unattractive male faces at all regions(frontal,frontal-central,central,central-parietal and parietal).Attractive female faces elicited a larger P2 than unattractive female faces at central sites,however,unattractive female faces elicited a larger P2 than attractive female faces at other regions.In addition,unattractive female faces elicited a larger N3 than attractive female faces at all regions.Unattractive male faces elicited a larger N3 than attractive male faces at parietal sites,however,attractive male faces elicited a larger N3 than unattractive male faces at other regions.Additionally,attractive female faces elicited a largerLPC than unattractive female faces.However,no effect on facial attractiveness was found in the subliminal condition.Furthermore,we further analyzed the effect of facial structure in the second experiment.Results showed that scrambled faces elicited a larger P2 than intact faces at frontal sites and frontal-central sites,however,intact faces elicited a larger P2 than scrambled faces at central,central-parietal and parietal sites.Moreover,intact faces elicited a larger N3 than scrambled faces at all regions.Overall,the present study demonstrated that:(1)Facial attractiveness induced LPC differences under attractiveness judgment task of conscious conditional.Under the task of gender judgment which is not related to attractiveness evaluation,facial attractiveness induced differences of N170,P2,N3 and LPC.The results of gender judgment task show that people can automatically extract facial attractiveness information,and facial attractiveness can be processed automatically.(2)No effect on facial attractiveness was found in the subliminal condition.The results show that the subliminal condition can prevent the individuals from processing the facial attractiveness information.The processing of facial attractiveness requires conscious awareness.