Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

462 CHAPTER 11 Social PsychologyWhat Is Beautiful Is Good We are culturallyconditioned to associate beautywith goodness and evil with ugliness—an implicit personality theory that hasbeen dubbed the “what is beautiful isgood” myth. One example of this culturalconditioning is the classic Disneyfilm Snow White. In the scene shown,the wicked stepmother is disguised asan old woman, complete with a wart onher nose. She offers the poisoned appleto the innocent and virtuous heroine,Snow White. (The Walt Disney Co.)For example, good-looking peopleare perceived as being more intelligent,happier, and better adjustedthan other people (Eagly & others,1991). Are they?After analyzing dozens of studies,psychologist Alan Feingold(1992) found very few personalitydifferences between beautiful peopleand their plainer counterparts.Physical attractiveness is not correlatedwith intelligence, mentalhealth, or even self-esteem. Overall,attractive people tend to be lesslonely, more popular, and less anxiousin social situations—all characteristics related to the advantage that their physicalattractiveness seems to confer on them in social situations. But as you’ll read inthe Focus on Neuroscience, there also seems to be a brain-based explanation for thegreater social success enjoyed by physically attractive people.So what general conclusion can we make about the process of person perception?Both deliberate and automatic thought processes influence our impressions,especially our first impressions. To quickly evaluate others, we often rely on easilyFOCUS ON NEUROSCIENCEBrain Reward When Making Eye Contact with Attractive PeopleHow does physical attractiveness contribute to social success? Astudy by neuroscientist Knut Kampe and his colleagues (2001) atUniversity College London may offer some insights. In their functionalmagnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, participantswere scanned while they looked at color photographs of 40different faces, some looking directly at the viewer (eye-contact)and some glancing away (non–eye-contact). After the fMRI scanningsession, participants rated the attractiveness of the facesthey had seen.The results showed that when we make direct eye contactwith a physically attractive person, an area on each side of thebrain called the ventral striatum is activated (yellow areas in fMRIscan). When the attractive person’s eye gaze is shifted away fromthe viewer, activity in the ventral striatum decreases. What makesthis so interesting is that the ventral striatum is a brain area thatpredicts reward (Bray & O'Doherty, 2007; Schultz & others,Eye-Contact FaceNon–Eye-Contact Face1997). Neural activity in the ventral striatum increases when anunexpected reward, such as food or water, suddenly appears.Conversely, activity in the ventral striatum decreases when anexpected reward fails to appear.As Kampe (2001) explains, “What we’ve shown is that whenwe make eye contact with an attractive person, the brain areathat predicts reward starts firing. If we see an attractive personbut cannot make eye contact with that person, the activity in thisregion goes down, signaling disappointment. This is the firststudy to show that the brain’s ventral striatum processes rewardsin the context of human social interaction."Other neuroscientists have expanded on Kampe’s findings andidentified additional brain reward areas that are responsive tofacial attractiveness. Of particular note is an area called theorbital frontal cortex, which is a region of the frontal cortexlocated just above the orbits (or sockets) of your eyes (Ishai,2007; O’Doherty & others, 2003). Another region is the amygdala.Both the orbital frontal cortex andthe amygdala are selectively responsive tothe reward value of attractive faces (Winston& others, 2007).“Facial beauty evokes a widely distributedneural network involving perceptual,decision-making, and rewardcircuits. [It] may serve as a neural triggerfor the pervasive effects of attractivenessin social interactions,” writes neuroscientistAnjan Chatterjee and his colleagues(2009). Clearly, then, the social advantagesassociated with facial attractivenessare reinforced by reward processingin the brain.