ArticleCurrent biology : CB2015
Individual Aesthetic Preferences for Faces Are Shaped Mostly by Environments, Not Genes.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 51 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
51 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 126 citations in OpenAlex.
- Seeking the "Beauty Center" in the Brain: A Meta-Analysis of fMRI Studies of Beautiful Human Faces and Visual Art.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2020Pooled it
- Dyadic Person Similarity Predicts Similarity in Face Judgements.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Article
- Baby face enlarges perceived reachable space.Experimental brain research · 2026Article
- A Validated Assessment Scale for the Auriculocephalic Angle in Asians.Aesthetic plastic surgery · 2026Article
- Conceptual trait associations predict impressions of highly variable faces.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Practical research on the boundaries of MAYA design principles with ceramic products as the carrier.PloS one · 2026Article
- Face evaluation: Findings, methods, and challenges.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- The perceptual primacy of feeling: Affectless visual machines explain a majority of variance in human visually evoked affect.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Improving accuracy and precision of heritability estimation in twin studies through hierarchical modeling: reassessing the measurement error assumption.Frontiers in genetics · 2025Article
- Beauty in the shadow of neurodegenerative disease: a narrative review on aesthetic experience, neural mechanisms, and therapeutic frontiers.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Appreciation of singing and speaking voices is highly idiosyncratic.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Social conformity updates the neural representation of facial attractiveness.Communications biology · 2024Article
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- Revealing Fine-grained Genetically Informed Cortical Parcellation Maps of Neonates Based on Multi-view Spectral Clustering.Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Annual International Conference · 2024Article
- Genetic effects on variability in visual aesthetic evaluations are partially shared across visual domains.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Individual attractiveness preferences differentially modulate immediate and voluntary attention.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- How do we describe other people from voices and faces?Cognition · 2023Article
- Aesthetic experience models human learning.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
- Understanding trait impressions from faces.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Although certain characteristics of human faces are broadly considered more attractive (e.g., symmetry, averageness), people also routinely disagree with each other on the relative attractiveness of faces. That is, to some significant degree, beauty is in the "eye of the beholder." Here, we investigate the origins of these individual differences in face preferences using a twin design, allowing us to estimate the relative contributions of genetic and environmental variation to individual face attractiveness judgments or face preferences. We first show that individual face preferences (IP) can be reliably measured and are readily dissociable from other types of attractiveness judgments (e.g., judgments of scenes, objects). Next, we show that individual face preferences result primarily from environments that are unique to each individual. This is in striking contrast to individual differences in face identity recognition, which result primarily from variations in genes [1]. We thus complete an etiological double dissociation between two core domains of social perception (judgments of identity versus attractiveness) within the same visual stimulus (the face). At the same time, we provide an example, rare in behavioral genetics, of a reliably and objectively measured behavioral characteristic where variations are shaped mostly by the environment. The large impact of experience on individual face preferences provides a novel window into the evolution and architecture of the social brain, while lending new empirical support to the long-standing claim that environments shape individual notions of what is attractive.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.