Cheng Hsuan Chen¹ (), Chien Chung Chen; ¹National Taiwan University

It is suggested (Eco, 2007) that the lack of beauty is not ugly, which requires the involvement of negative emotions, but unremarkable. We tested whether beauty and ugliness exist on the same perceptual dimension by observing how facial prototypicality affects facial ugliness and beauty. The prototype faces were created by averaging frontal view faces of 36 individuals. We then interpolated between the prototype faces and the original faces to create faces with various degrees of prototypicality and extrapolated out of the original faces to create caricatures and out of the prototype faces to create anti-faces. We then presented participants with faces of varying degrees of prototypicality and asked them to rate each face on its perceived ugliness, beauty, and symmetry with a 6-point Likert scale. The prototype faces were considered the most beautiful and the least ugly, while the caricatures were deemed the ugliest and least attractive. The non-existent anti-faces received the equivalent rating as its corresponding normal face, suggesting that the evaluation of attractiveness is based on the deviations from prototype faces. In general, prototypicality was positively correlated with perceived beauty but negatively correlated with perceived ugliness. Prototypicality contributes to the perception of ugliness. Descriptions of a face as 'unattractive' were comparable to descriptions of it as 'ugly.' The results suggest that the spectrum of aesthetic judgment encompasses both beauty and ugliness, challenging existing theories on the aesthetic difference between ugliness and averageness previously proposed (Eco, 2007).

Acknowledgements: NSTC (Taiwan) 112-2423-H-002-002