Abstract
Previous studies have found that the own-race faces are better recognized than faces of the other-race, which is the so-called other-race effect (ORE). However, race is not the only crucial factor that influences face recognition, recent empirical evidence highlights the facilitating effect of facial attractiveness in face recognition, thus suggesting that facial attractiveness may modulate ORE. To verify this, the current study selected the Chinese and Caucasian faces with different levels of facial attractiveness (i.e., attractive, medium, unattractive) as material, recruited Chinese (Experiment 1) and Caucasian (Experiment 2) participants, and adopted an old/new recognition task to test recognition performance via signal detection theory. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 convergently highlighted the interaction between facial attractiveness and race. Specifically, both Chinese and Caucasian participants systematically performed worse recognition for other-race faces, but this worse recognition performance was saliently attenuated in the attractive condition. These results suggested that the ORE could be attenuated by attractive faces.
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Liu, J., Guo, H., Peng, Y. et al. Facial attractiveness facilitates other-race faces recognizing: the role of facial attractiveness in other-race effect. Curr Psychol 42, 27919–27926 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03734-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03734-3