얼굴 매력도와 긍정적인 얼굴 표정은 선호판단 등과 같은 얼굴인상형성에 있어 중요한 신호들을 제공하며 다양한 사회적 상호작용과 의사결정과정에 많은 영향을 미치는 것으로 알려져 있다. 본 연구에서는 얼굴의 매력도와 긍정적 얼굴 표정처리에 자동적으로 그리고 특정적으로 관여하는 신경학적 기제들을 알아보기 위해 자기공명영상 기법(fMRI)을 사용하였다. 뇌영상을 촬영하는 동안 참가자들은 빠르게 제시되는 얼굴들을 기억하는 과제를 수행하였고, 실험이 끝난 후 기억과제에 사용되었던 얼굴 사진들을 다시 보며 각 얼굴에 대한 매력과 얼굴표정의 정서가를 평가하였다. 각 얼굴사진에 대한 집단 평균 매력도와 얼굴표정 정서가에 의해 독립적으로 상관을 보이는 뇌영역들을 알아 본 결과 ventral striatum, amygdala, 그리고 hippocampus를 포함하는 medial temporal lobe영역은 얼굴의 매력도와 정적 상관관계를 보였던 반면, rostral cingulate cortex와 posterior cingulate cortex영역들은 얼굴의 긍정적 정서가와 정적 상관을 보이는 것으로 관찰되었다. 본 연구 결과들은 얼굴 매력도와 긍정적인 얼굴 표정 정보를 의식적 노력없이 자동적으로 부호화하는 독립된 뇌기제들이 존재하며 이러한 기제들이 다양한 사회적 상황에서 얼굴 선호판단에 암묵적인 영향을 미칠 가능성을 시사하고 있다.
In the present study utilizing functional MRI technique, we aimed to examine the neural circuitries uniquely involved in encoding facial attractiveness and happy expression in the absence of explicit attention. While being scanned, 22 female subjects performed a simple working memory task, where they were asked to report whether a target face was included in an immediately preceding block of 10 novel faces. At the end of the experiment, subjects saw all the faces once again and rated each of them in terms of subjectively perceived facial attractiveness and happiness. In order to examine the neural systems engaged uniquely in encoding facial attractiveness and facial happiness, the hemodynamic responses to face images were modulated separately by the parameters of normative facial attractiveness and happiness ratings. The analyses revealed that the ventral striatum as well as the medial temporal lobe including the amygdala and the anterior hippocampus showed a significant positive correlation with facial attractiveness, but not with facial happiness, whereas the rostral anterior cingulate cortex and posterior cingulate cortex showed a significant positive correlation with facial happiness, but not with facial attractiveness. To our best knowledge, the present study demonstrated for the first time that facial attractiveness and facial happiness may be encoded by separate neural mechanisms even in the absence of direct attention.
Aharon, I., Etcoff, N., Ariely, D., Chabris, C. F., O'Connor, E. & Breiter, H. C. (2001). Beautiful faces have variable reward value: fMRI and behavioral evidence. Neuron, 32 (3), 537-551.
Alley, T. R. (1988). Social and applied aspects of face perception: An introduction. :Erlbaum.
Barocas, R. & Karoly, P. (1972). Effects of physical appearance on social responsiveness. Psychological Reports, 31 (2), 495-500.
Benson, P. L., Karabenick, S. A. & Lerner, R. M. (1976). Pretty pleases: The effects of physical attractiveness, race, and sex on receiving help. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 12 (5), 409-415.
Berscheid, E. & Walster, E. (1974). Physical attractiveness. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 7. Ed. L. Berkowitz. New York :Academic Press.
Blood, A., J, Zatorre, R. J., Bermudez, P. & Evans, A. C. (1999). Emotional responses to pleasant and unpleasant music correlate with activity in paralimbic brain regions. Nature Neuroscience, 2 (4), 382-387.
Bowman, P. C. (1979). Physical constancy and trait attribution: Attenuation of the primacy effect. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 5 (1), 61- 64.
Buss, D. M. & Barnes, M. (1986). Preferences in human mate selection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50 (3), 559-570.
Cash, T. F. & Kilcullen, R. (1985). The aye of the beholder: Susceptibility to sexism and beautyism in the evaluation of managerial applicants. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 15 (4), 591-605.
Cavanna, A. E. & Trimble, M. R. (2006). The precuneus: a review of its functional anatomy and behavioural correlates. Brain, 129 (3), 564-583.
Chaiken, S. (1979). Communicator physical attractiveness and persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37 (8), 1387-1397.
Cloutier, J., Heatherton, T. F., Whalen, P. J., & Kelley, W. M. (2008). Are attractive people rewarding? Sex differences in the neural substrates of facial attractiveness. J Cogn Neurosci, 20 (6), 941-951.
Cohen N. J. & Eichenbaum H. (1993). Memory, amnesia and the hippocampal system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Critchley, H, D. & Rolls, E. T. (1996). Hunger and satiety modify the responses of olfactory and visual neurons in the primate orbitofrontal cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology, 75 (4), 285-290.
Cross, J. F., Cross, J., & Daly, J. (1971). Sex, race, age, and beauty as factors in recognition of faces. Perception and Psychophysics, 10, 393-396.
Damasio, A. R., Grabowski, T. J., Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Ponto, L. L., Parvizi, J., & Hichwa, R. D. (2000). Subcortical and cortical brain activity during the feeling of self-generated emotions Nature Neuroscience, 3 (10), 1049-1056.
Dolan, R. J., Fletcher, P., Morris, J., Kapur, N., Deakin, J. F.. & Frith, C. D. (1996). Neural activation during covert processing of positive emotional facial expressions, NeuroImage, 4 (3), 194-200.
Egner, T., Etkin, A., Gale, S., & Hirsch, J. (2008). Dissociable neural systems resolve conflict from emotional versus nonemotional distracters. Cereb Cortex, 18 (6), 1475-84.
Engell, A. D., Haxby, J. V. & Todorov, A. (2007). Implicit trustworthiness decisions: Automatic coding of face properties in the human amygdala. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19 (9), 1508-1519
Etkin, A., Egner, T., Peraza, D., Kandel, E., & Hirsch, J. (2006). Resolving Emotional Conflict: A Role for the Rostral Anterior Cingulate Cortex in Modulating Activity in the Amygdala. Neuron, 51 (6), 871-882.
Everitt, B. J., Parkinson, J. A., Olmstead, M. C., Arroyo, M., Robledo, P. & Robbins, T. W. (1999). Associative processes in addiction and reward. The role of amygdala-ventral subsystems. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 877, 412-438.
Gamer, M., & Büchel, C. (2009). Amygdala activation predicts gaze toward fearful eyes. J Neurosci. 29 (28), 9123-6.
Hess, U., Banse, R., & Kappas, A. (1995). The intensity of facial expressions is determined by underlying affective state and social situation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 280-288.
Hess, U., Blairy, S., & Kleck, R. E. (2000). The Influence of Facial Emotion Displays, Gender, and Ethnicity on Judgments of Dominance and Affiliation. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 24, 265-283.
Fiske, S. T. & Cox, M. G. (1979). Person Concepts: The effect of target familiarity and descriptive purpose on the process of describing others. Journal of Personality, 47 (1), 136-161.
Fitzgerald, D. A., Angstadt, M., Jelsone L. M., Nathan, P. J., Phan, K. L. (2006). Beyond threat: amygdala reactivity across multiple expressions of facial affect. NeuroImage, 30, 1441-1448.
Gorno-Tempini, M. L., Pradelli, S., Seraafini, M., Pagnoni, G., Baraldi, P., Porro, C., Nicoletti, R., Umità C. & Nichelli, P. (2001). Explicit and incidental facial expression processing: An fMRI study. NeuroImage, 14 (2), 465 - 473.
Kim, H., Somerville, L. H., Johnstone, T., Alexander, A. L, & Whalen, P. J (2003). .Inverse amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex responses to surprised faces. Neuroreport, 14 (18), 2317-2322.
Kim, H., Somerville, L. H., Johnstone, T., Polis, S., Alexander, A. L., Shin, L., & Whalen, P. J. (2004). Contextual modulation of amygdala responsivity to surprised faces, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16 (10), 1730-1745.
Kim, H., Adolphs, R., O'Doherty, J. P., Shimojo, S. (2007). Temporal isolation of neural processes underlying face preference decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104 (46), 18253-18258.
Knutson, B., Westdorp, A., Kaiser, E., & Hmooer, D. J. (2000). fMRI visualization of brain activity during a monetary incentive delay task. Neuroimage, 12 (1), 20-27.
Knutson, B., Adams, C. M., Fong, G. W., & Hmooer, D. J. (2001). Anticipation of increasing monetary reward selectively recruits nucleus accumbens. The Journal of Neuroscience, 21 (16), 1-5.
LaBar, K. S., Gatenby, J. C., Gore, J. C., LeDoux, J. E. & Phelps, E. A. (1998) Human amygdala activation during conditioned fear acquisition and extinction: a mixed-trial fMRI study. Neuron, 20 (5), 937-945.
Lane, R .D., Reiman, E. M., Axelrod, B., Yun, L-S, Holmes A. & Schwartz G. E. (1998). Neural correlates of levels of emotional awareness: Evidence of an interaction between emotion and attention in the anterior cingulate cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 10 (4), 525-535.
Langlois, J. H. Ritter, J. M ., Roggman, L. A. & Vaughn, L. S. (1991). Facial diversity and infant preferences for attractive faces. Developmental Psychology, 27 (1), 363 - 369.
LeDoux, J. (1996). Emotional networks and motor control: a fearful view. Progress in Brain Research, 107, 437-446.
LeDoux, J. (2000). Emotion circuits in the brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience 23, 155-184.
McGaugh, J. L., McIntyre, C. K. & Power, A. E. (2002) Amygdala modulation of memory consolidation: Interaction with other brain systems. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 78 (3), 539-552.
Morris, J. S., Frith, C. D., Perrett, D. I., Rowland, D., Young, A. W., Calder, A. J. & Dolan, R. J. (1998). A differential neural response in the human amygdala to fearful and happy facial expressions. Nature, 383 (6603), 812-815.
O'Doherty J., Rolls E. T., Francis, S., Bowtell, R., McGlone, F., Kobal, G., Renner, B. & Ahne, G. (2000). Sensory-specific satiety-related olfactory activation of the human orbitofrontal cortex. NeuroReport, 11 (4), 399-402
O'Doherty, J., Winston, J., Critchley, H., Perrett, D., Burt, D. M. & Dolan, R. J. (2003). Beauty in a smile: the role of medial orbitofrontal cortex in facial attractiveness. Neuropsychologia, 41 (2), 147-155.
Olson, I. R. & Marshuetz, C. (2005). Facial Attractiveness Is Appraised in a Glance. Emotion. 5 (4), 498-502.
Oosterhof, N. N., & Todorov, A. (2009). Shared perceptual basis of emotional expressions and trustworthiness impressions from faces. Emotion, 9, 128-133.
Pallak, S. R. (1983). Salience of a communicator’s physical attractiveness and persuasion: A heuristic versus systematic processing interpretation. Social Cognition, 2 (2), 156-168.
Reis, H. T., Wilson, I. M., Monestere, C., & Bernstein, S. (1990). What is smiling is beautiful and good. European Journal of Social Psychology, 20, 259-267.
Russell, J. H. and Fernandez-Dols, J. M. (1997). The psychology of facial expression, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Scharlemann, J. P. W., Eckel, C. C., Kacelnik, A., & Wilson, R. K. (2001). The value of a smile: Game theory with a human face. Journal of Economic Psychology, 22, 617-640.
Schiller, D., Freeman, J. B., Mitchell, J. P., Uleman, J. S., & Phelps, E. A. (2009). A neural mechanism of first impressions. Nat Neurosci., 12 (4), 508-14.
Schultz, W., Apicella, P., Scarnati, E. & Ljungberg, T. (1992). Neuronal activity in monkey ventral striatum related to the expectation of reward. Journal of Neuroscience, 12 (12), 4595-4610.
Small, D. M., Zatorre, R. J., Dagher, A., Evans, A. C. & Jones-Gotman, M. (2001). Changes in brain activity related to eating chocolate: From pleasure to aversion. Brain, 124 (9), 1729-1733.
Sombers, L. A., Beyene, M., Carelli, R. M., & Wightman, R. M. (2009). Synaptic overflow of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens arises from neuronal activity in the ventral tegmental area. J Neurosci, 29(6), 1735-1742.
Somerville, L. H., Kim, H., Johnstone, T., Alexander, A. L., & Whalen, P. J. (2004). Human amygdala responses during presentation of happy and neutral faces: correlations with state anxiety. Biological Psychiatry, 55 (9), 897-903.
Squire, L. R. (1992). Memory and the hippocampus: a synthesis from findings with rats, monkeys, and humans. Psychological Review, 99 (2). 195-231.
Squire, L. R. & Schacter, D. L. (2002). The Neuropsychology of Memory. :Guilford Press.
Stone, A. & Valentine, T. (2007). Angry and happy faces perceived without awareness: A comparison with the affective impact of masked famous faces. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 19 (2), 161-186.
Symons, D. (1979). The evolution of humor sexuality. New York: Oxford University.
Todorov, A., Baron, S. G. & Oosterhof, N. N. (2008). Evaluating face trustworthiness: a model based approach. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 3 (2), 119-127.
Walster, E., Aronson, V., Abrahams, D. & Rottman, L. (1966). Importance of Physical Attractiveness in dating behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4 (5), 508-516.
Whalen, P. J. (1998). Fear, Vigilance, and Ambiguity: Initial neuroimaging studies of human amygdala. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7 (6), 177-188.
Winston, J. S., O’Doherty, J., Kilner, J. M., Perrett, D. I. & Dolan, R. J. (2007). Brain systems for assessing facial attractiveness. Neuropsychologia, 45 (1), 195-206.
Vuilleumier, P. & Sander, D. (2008). Trust and valence processing in the amygdala. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 3 (4), 299-302.