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A study that asked participants to rate 192 art portraits found that beauty and attractiveness ratings are highly associated but depend on somewhat different factors. While both characteristics were associated with the artistic style of a portrait, beauty ratings also depended on self-similarity and symmetry. The paper was published in i-Perception.
Human faces have been among the most enduring subjects of art, appearing in portraits across cultures and historical periods. Even when artists use highly distinctive styles, they usually preserve enough facial structure for viewers to recognize the person being depicted. This makes portraits unusual aesthetic objects because they can be appreciated both for the beauty of the artwork itself and for the attractiveness of the person shown.
These two forms of appeal are often closely related, but they are not necessarily based on the same psychological processes. Facial attractiveness depends strongly on the visible characteristics of the face, whereas the beauty of a portrait can also be shaped by composition, color, lighting, technique, and artistic style.
A portrait can be visually beautiful even when the depicted person is not especially attractive. Conversely, an attractive face may appear in an artwork that viewers find aesthetically unremarkable or even unpleasant. Judgments of artistic beauty also seem to be more strongly influenced by interpretation, context, and other cognitive effects than judgments of facial attractiveness.
Study author Gregor U. Hayn-Leichsenring wanted to find a way to distinguish between beauty and attractiveness based on their relationship to objective properties. He conducted an online experiment using art portraits as stimuli.
Study participants were 300 adults aged 18 to 71. Their average age was 33.6 years. 101 of them were women.
The study author created a database of 192 digital copies of art portraits. It included portraits from different artistic styles (Baroque, Impressionism, and Expressionism) and their numbers were balanced.
In the experiment, each participant viewed 70 randomly selected images from this database and rated them for attractiveness and beauty. The ratings were made on a 9-point Likert scale (a rating format ranging from 1 to 9). There were no time restrictions for giving the ratings. The author used the QIPs toolbox to analyze the characteristics of art pieces in the dataset. The QIPs toolbox is an open-access tool for calculating standardized quantitative image properties such as color, complexity, symmetry, balance, fractal structure, or entropy. It is used in empirical aesthetics research.
Results showed that attractiveness and beauty ratings were highly correlated within a style. However, they were not identical. Overall, Impressionistic art pieces tended to be rated as more attractive, while Baroque pieces tended to be seen as more beautiful. Most Expressionistic pieces were seen as less beautiful and attractive than the other two styles, with notable exceptions.
The author created a statistical model that aimed to examine the associations between attractiveness and beauty ratings and characteristics of pictures. He found that beauty and attractiveness ratings both depend on style, but that beauty ratings also depend on self-similarity and mirror symmetry of the image. Attractiveness ratings were not predicted by any specific image properties that the QIPs toolbox could identify.
Mirror symmetry is the degree to which an image is similar to its mirror reflection along major axes. Self-similarity, on the other hand, is a measure of how similar edge and gradient patterns are across different spatial scales of an image. Higher self-similarity indicates that there are repeated structural patterns at multiple levels.
“In this study, two closely related hedonic values were examined, only one of which showed systematic relationships with self-similarity and mirror symmetry. Overall, beauty evaluations are not only more influenced by cognitive processes than attractiveness evaluations, but are also more strongly associated with specific QIPs [quantitative image properties], which was not observed for attractiveness ratings,” the study author concluded.
The study sheds light on how humans perceive beauty and attractiveness. However, the author emphasized that the link between image properties and beauty ratings was likely driven primarily by Baroque portraits, which were on average less self-similar and more symmetrical than the other styles. It should also be noted that the study focused exclusively on artistic portraits, and findings evaluating beauty and attractiveness of other types of stimuli might differ.
The study, “Disentangling beauty and attractiveness in art portraits: Differential links to quantitative image properties“, was authored by Gregor U. Hayn-Leichsenring.