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“The reward system is involved in generating the experience of pleasure when, for instance, we enjoy tasty food or happen to win a lottery. It turns out that the same system is also engaged in creating the feelings of pleasure when we look at a pretty face”. This quote is from Dr. Olga Chelnokova of the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo. Ultimately, the brain reward system, which is a cluster of regions deep in our brain, is involved in our evaluation of other people’s attractiveness. She also emphasizes that the reward system gives an immediate response, an extra pleasure, but that the system’s response does not determine the path for our behavior in the long term. “For instance, we cannot eat chocolate all the time because it is not healthy. Similarly, there are many factors that contribute to a good relationship much more than facial attractiveness. But we learn more about other qualities as we get to know the other person better.” Thus, these other factors can determine someone’s overall attractiveness in the long run.
For my project, I took photographs of 2 to 3 participants reacting to different kinds of pictures of people. The pictures were shown in the order of someone who has normal features, semi-attractive features, attractive features, and extremely attractive features. I also have bold colors and artwork as the background of the reaction photos. I also recorded the participants answers to the question “What does attractiveness mean to you?” These recordings are meant to show that attractiveness is not just composed of someone’s appearance, but also everything else that makes up who they are a person.
References
https://www.sv.uio.no/psi/english/research/news-and-events/news/why-we-look-at-pretty-faces.html
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/december/infants-process-faces-121112.html
The Science Behind Why People Don’t Like How They Look In Photos
Interesting findings! This is a very fun project it seems like to conduct.
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