ISSN : 1226-9654
Attractive faces are important visual stimuli that capture people’s attention and influence how people interact with others. Many studies have explored the visual perceptual features that affect facial attractiveness, one of which is spatial frequency information. The face information is processed independently according to the spatial frequency band. The high frequency (HF) information includes the local characteristics of face such as eyes, nose, and mouth, while the low frequency (LF) information includes the global (or holistic) characteristics. Previous studies have explored the relationship between spatial frequencies and attractiveness by identifying specific spatial frequency bands that have a dominant influence on perceived attractiveness; however, the relationship is still unclear and has not been fully studied. Whereas most studies agree that LF plays the more important role in the perception of male facial attractiveness, there is still controversy over female facial attractiveness. This controversy may be due to limitations of previous studies' research methodologies, such as not isolating HF and taking indirect measures when assessing facial attractiveness. The purpose of the current study is to examine systematically which spatial frequency information plays the more key role in the perception of female facial attractiveness. In a preliminary experiment, participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of female faces applied to HF or LF filters. Based on the results, we divided face stimuli into four categories: (a) beauty condition for faces that received a high rating score in both HF and LF images, (b) normal condition for faces that received low scores in both HF and LF images, (c) HF beauty condition for faces with high HF low LF scores, and (d) LF beauty condition for faces with low HF scores and high LF scores. In experiment 1, participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of hybrid images in which the HF-filtered image and the LF-filtered image of a single face overlapped. The results showed that perceived attractiveness for HF beauty condition was higher than for LF beauty condition (beauty > HF beauty > LF beauty > normal condition). In experiment 2, real photo images of each beauty category were employed as stimuli, and results were consistent with experiment 1. The results of both experiments indicate that HF information has a stronger influence than LF information in the perception of female facial attractiveness.
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