Unattractive faces are more attractive when the bottom-half is masked, an effect that reverses when the top-half is concealed

Unattractive faces are more attractive when the bottom-half is masked, an effect that reverses when the top-half is concealed. Farid Pazhoohi & Alan Kingstone. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications volume 7. Jan 24 2022. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41235-022-00359-9

Abstract: Facial attractiveness in humans signals an individual’s genetic condition, underlying physiology and health status, serving as a cue to one’s mate value. The practice of wearing face masks for prevention of transmission of airborne infections may disrupt one’s ability to evaluate facial attractiveness, and with it, cues to an individual's health and genetic condition. The current research investigated the effect of face masks on the perception of face attractiveness. Across four studies, we tested if below- and above-average attractive full faces are equally affected by wearing facial masks. The results reveal that for young faces (Study 1) and old faces (Study 2) a facial mask increases the perceived attractiveness of relatively unattractive faces, but there is no effect of wearing a face mask for highly attractive faces. Study 3 shows that the same pattern of ratings emerged when the bottom-half of the faces are cropped rather than masked, indicating that the effect is not mask-specific. Our final Study 4, in which information from only the lower half of the faces was made available, showed that contrary to our previous findings, highly attractive half-faces are perceived to be less attractive than their full-face counterpart; but there is no such effect for the less attractive faces. This demonstrates the importance of the eye-region in the perception of attractiveness, especially for highly attractive faces. Collectively these findings suggest that a positivity-bias enhances the perception of unattractive faces when only the upper face is visible, a finding that may not extend to attractive faces because of the perceptual weight placed on their eye-region.

General discussion

In the current research we investigated the effect of facial masks on the perception of facial attraction. Specifically, we tested whether below- and above-average full faces are equally affected by wearing facial masks. Our first study revealed that for younger faces a facial mask will increase the perceived attractiveness if the unmasked face is relatively unattractive, but wearing a mask will not help or hinder highly attractive faces. Study 2 revealed that this pattern of results generalises to old faces. And our Study 3 showed that the same effect occurs even when the bottom half of young faces are cropped rather than masked, i.e., the effect is not mask-specific.

Collectively, our first two studies, which show that face masks will help and never hinder one's perceived attractiveness conflicts with the findings of Miyazaki and Kawahara (2016) who showed that facial mask decrease the perceived attractiveness in a pre-COVID-19 pandemic era. Interestingly, the same lab has tested the same question recently during the pandemic and reported a similar result to our first two studies—attractiveness of below-average faces increased (Kamatani et al., 2021). A similar pattern of improvement in attractiveness ratings of unattractive faces is confirmed in another post-pandemic study (Patel et al., 2020), signifying the change in attitudes in response to social norms associated with mask wearing (Carbon, 2021). However, the results of Kamatani et al. (2021) for masked faces of above-average attractiveness showed a reduction in perception of attractiveness compared to unmasked faces—a result not found in the studies here and those of Patel et al. (2020). Such discrepancy might be a result of cultural differences (Japanese vs. Western) or due to differences in the stimuli used, in terms of their range of attractiveness.

Our final Study 4 examined if our previous findings are specific to the removal of information from the lower half of the face, or does it reflect a more general positivity bias where any incomplete face information is inferred to be attractive (Orghian & Hidalgo, 2020). The results did not support this possibility. When observers were asked to judge the attractiveness of faces that had the upper half of the face removed (including the eyes), the effect was to reduce the perceived attractiveness of highly attractive faces, and to have no positive effect on less attractive faces. This latter study demonstrates that in North America the effect of perceiving an incomplete face can be detrimental; and it supports previous work indicating that the eye-region has a special status in perceptions of facial attractiveness (Kwart et al., 2012; Nguyen et al., 2009). Indeed, the fact that in Studies 1–3 the eye region of the face was preserved helps to explain why masking or cropping the lower half of the face had no effect on the perceived attractiveness of highly attractive faces. Collectively, across four experiments, our study reveals that facial masks increase the perceived attractiveness of less attractive faces, while they do not affect those that are highly attractive. This finding applies to young and old faces, and it extends to other methods of isolating the region of the upper face; but it does not apply to the situation when the lower half of the face is isolated. These findings suggest that a positivity-bias enhances the perception of unattractive faces when only the upper face is visible, a finding that may not extend to attractive faces because of the perceptual weight placed on their eye-region.