Beauty automatically engages our hand movement: Both attractive & unattractive faces captured greater visual attention compared to moderate faces; attractive faces attracted hand movement more strongly

Beauty in the eyes and the hand of the beholder: Eye and hand movements' differential responses to facial attractiveness. Natalie T. Faust, Anjan Chatterjee, George I. Christopoulos. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 85, November 2019, 103884. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.103884

Highlights
•    Facial attractiveness guides attention for actions differently through eye and hand movement.
•    Hand movement was found to be mostly driven by attractive (but not unattractive or moderate) faces.
•    Eye movement was driven by faces on the ends of the attractiveness spectrum (attractive and unattractive but not moderate).
•    “Being moved” by beauty might not simply be a metaphor. Rather, beauty automatically engages our hand movement.
•    Besides eye movement, hand movement discloses additional information on facial attention mechanisms.

Abstract: Faces carry significant social information and, as such, humans need to allocate attention to them. In particular, facial attractiveness is an important dimension that considerably influences social judgment. The allocation of attentional resources to facial attractiveness has been widely examined in social psychology, however mostly by measures of eye movement. While this literature demonstrates the influence of facial attractiveness on overt attention, how facial attractiveness drives covert attention is less known. In two studies, we tracked eye and hand movements while participants were engaged in a numerical task in the presence of faces of various degrees of attractiveness. Results show that both attractive and unattractive faces captured greater visual attention compared to moderate faces, whereas attractive faces attracted hand movement more strongly than both unattractive and moderate faces. The present study suggests that facial attractiveness guides attention for actions differently through eye and hand movements.