People tend to find more "symmetrical" faces more "beautiful" and "attractive," but those with visual arts or dance expertise don't find symmetrical faces especially beautiful (but do still find them more attractive); it seems you can be trained to find beauty in asymmetry

The Role of Art Expertise and Symmetry on Facial Aesthetic Preferences. Luis Carlos Pereira Monteiro et al. Symmetry 2022, 14(2), 423; February 20 2022. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym14020423

Abstract: Humans, like other species, have a preference for symmetrical visual stimuli, a preference that is influenced by factors such as age, sex, and artistic training. In particular, artistic training seems to decrease the rejection of asymmetry in abstract stimuli. However, it is not known whether the same trend would be observed in relation to concrete stimuli such as human faces. In this article, we investigated the role of expertise in visual arts, music, and dance, in the perceived beauty and attractiveness of human faces with different asymmetries. With this objective, the beauty and attractiveness of 100 photographs of faces with different degrees of asymmetry were evaluated by 116 participants with different levels of art expertise. Expertise in visual arts and dance was associated with the extent to which facial asymmetry influenced the beauty ratings assigned to the faces. The greater the art expertise in visual arts and dance, the more indifferent to facial asymmetry the participant was to evaluate beauty. The same effect was not found for music and neither for attractiveness ratings. These findings are important to help understand how face aesthetic evaluation is modified by artistic training and the difference between beauty and attractiveness evaluations.

Keywords: symmetry; aesthetics; preference; art experts; human faces

4. Discussion

We investigated for the first time the role of expertise in visual arts, music, and dance, in assessing the beauty and attractiveness of human faces with different asymmetries. Following theoretical models about aesthetic processing, it is expected that art experts and laypersons will differ on their aesthetic evaluation of different sensory features [53,54,55,56,57], including visual symmetry or asymmetry [49,50,51]. Exploring individual differences, we found that people with higher visual arts and dance expertise tend to disregard facial asymmetry in beauty evaluation of human faces, but not in attractiveness evaluation. The same trend was not found for music experts.

In this work, we use a continuous measure for art expertise as proposed by several authors [70,83,99]. Many studies have used art expertise as a quasi-categorical variable, artificially dividing participants into artists and non-artists—a dichotomy that does not capture the variability within groups concerning this variable [70]. As an alternative, we use a questionnaire that takes into account not only formal education but professional experiences, skills, and other artistic experiences. Art experts scored highest in their specific areas (e.g., dancers scored higher than other groups in the dance expertise section of our questionnaire). Moreover, art expertise significantly correlated with art interest and with creativity in their specific domains (e.g., visual art expertise scores correlated significantly with creativity scores in visual arts). Such results provide evidence of the instrument’s validity to measure expertise.

Most research investigating human preference for faces uses the terms “beauty” and “attractiveness” as synonyms, or simply does not differentiate between them [24,100,101,102]. In this study, however, we consider beauty and attractiveness as two different variables, as has been done by some authors [103,104,105]. We observed that although there is a moderate correlation between these two variables, the mean scores for beauty and attractiveness were significantly different. As discussed below, different patterns of individual differences in the assessment of beauty and attractiveness were found, suggesting that they are, in fact, two different variables. In our protocol, after the presentation of the image of the face to be evaluated, the participant first indicated the respective beauty rating, and only afterward the attractiveness rating, so we cannot completely exclude the possibility that the sequence of events may have interfered with the response.

In general, we found that the degree to which facial asymmetry affects beauty evaluation (i.e., aesthetic sensitivity to facial asymmetry) was influenced by participant’s visual arts and dance expertise, but not music expertise. Previous research has found an effect of visual arts expertise in the aesthetic evaluation of symmetry/asymmetry in abstract figures [49,50,51]. The results of Weichselbaum et al. [50] and Gartus et al. [51] indicated that art experts, in general, tended to evaluate stimuli independently from their asymmetry when compared to laypersons. Our results demonstrate that the same trend found for abstract figures can be expected for human faces aesthetic evaluation, not only for visual arts experts but also for dance experts.

While we found a positive effect of the expertise in visual arts and dance on the aesthetic sensitivity to facial asymmetry based on individual differences in the perceived beauty of human faces, we didn’t find the same result for music. Visual and auditory stimuli are evaluated differently, and while the appreciation of visual arts and dance relies on vision, the appreciation of music relies on sound. Thus, the differences in the visual assessment of beauty may be related to the peculiarities of each artistic category. These results are consistent with Clemente et al. [82], who found stimuli modality-specific (visual/auditory) effects on evaluative judgments. Moreover, musicians often have a high affinity to symmetrical features, as these are essential to organize the tempo of a melody [5,106].

No evidence for the effect of any of the three areas of art expertise on aesthetic sensitivity to facial asymmetry based on attractiveness ratings was found. This difference between beauty and attractiveness can be explained by the mate choice importance in our species. The mate choice criteria tend to be more stable during human development [107], and therefore should be less influenced by art training. However, it is necessary to take into account the participant’s sexual orientation and the gender of the person in the photo evaluated to discuss mate choice accurately. Since our experimental design is not suitable for this type of analysis, we also suggest that further studies take into account these variables.

We also found no effect of facial asymmetry on general beauty or attractiveness ratings. Despite several studies showed that facial asymmetry is an important predictor of facial preference, the magnitude of this effect is relatively small based on meta-analytic estimates [29]. It is also possible that this effect was not found in our study since our sample includes art experts, whose beauty assessment tended to disregard facial asymmetry as commented above.

A possible limitation of this study is the under-representation of highly specialized artists in the areas of interest. This happened in our study because we mostly sought out participants in a general university population, and not in art courses and artistic spaces. Therefore, we suggest that new studies should include more participants with higher art expertise.

The present study concludes that people with different art expertise use asymmetry information differently to evaluate facial beauty. This result can be important in understanding how the facial aesthetic evaluation is modified by this type of training and to give us clues about the way symmetry perception can be affected during human development.