Zhang Shu, Wang Hailing, Guo Qingke
1 Department of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, People's Republic of China.
Evol Psychol. 2018 Oct-Dec;16(4):1474704918812140. doi: 10.1177/1474704918812140.
Facial attractiveness plays important roles in social interaction. Electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies found several brain areas to be differentially responsive to attractive relative to unattractive faces. However, little is known about the time course of the information processing, especially under the unattended condition. Based on a "cross-modal delayed response" paradigm, the present study aimed to explore the automatic mechanism of facial attractiveness processing of females with different physiological cycles and males, respectively, through recording the event-related potentials in response to (un)attractive opposite-sex faces by two experiments. The attractiveness-related visual mismatch negativity (attractiveness vMMN) in posterior scalp distribution was recorded in both the experiments, which indicated that attractive faces could be processed automatically. And high-attractive opposite-sex faces can elicit larger vMMN in males than females in menstrual period in Study 1, but similar as females in ovulatory period in Study 2. Furthermore, by comparison, the latency of attractiveness vMMN in females with the ovulatory period was the longest. These results indicated as follows: (1) Males were more sensitive to attractive female faces, (2) females in ovulatory period were also attracted by the attractive male faces, (3) the long vMMN latency in females during ovulatory period suggested a special reproductive motivation to avoid being tainted by genes, which takes priority over the breeding motivation.
面部吸引力在社交互动中起着重要作用。电生理和神经影像学研究发现，相对于不具吸引力的面孔，有几个脑区对有吸引力的面孔有不同的反应。然而，对于信息处理的时间进程，尤其是在未被注意的条件下，人们了解甚少。基于“跨模态延迟反应”范式，本研究旨在通过两个实验记录对（不）具吸引力的异性面孔做出反应时的事件相关电位，分别探索处于不同生理周期的女性和男性对面部吸引力进行加工的自动机制。在两个实验中均记录到了后头皮分布的与吸引力相关的视觉失匹配负波（吸引力vMMN），这表明有吸引力的面孔能够被自动加工。在研究1中，高吸引力的异性面孔在男性中比处于月经期的女性能引发更大的vMMN，但在研究2中与处于排卵期的女性相似。此外，通过比较，处于排卵期的女性的吸引力vMMN潜伏期最长。这些结果表明：（1）男性对有吸引力的女性面孔更敏感，（2）处于排卵期的女性也会被有吸引力的男性面孔所吸引，（3）处于排卵期的女性较长的vMMN潜伏期表明一种特殊的生殖动机，即避免被基因污染，这种动机优先于繁殖动机。
