The Effect Of Facial Attractiveness On Time Perception And Its Brain Mechanism

With the improvement of living standards,people’s pursuit of beauty is getting higher and higher,and the importance of face attraction has been paid more and more attention.More and more research in the field of social psychology has also confirmed that facial attractiveness has an impact on interpersonal interaction,job hunting,mate selection and many other aspects.The importance of time as a way of human existence is self-evident.When people face different attractive faces,the perception of the length of time changes,which is the embodiment of face attraction affecting time perception.However,the current internal mechanism of the influence of face attraction on the perception of time is still inconclusive.How the different attractive faces play a role in the process of time information processing is still unknown.Previous studies have used behavioral experiments and lacked in-depth brains exploration.Moreover,Previous studies have all taken western women as subjects,and neither explored this issue from the perspective of men nor conducted empirical studies from the background of oriental culture.To this end,this study manipulates female face images of different attractive levels in time replication tasks,to observe the perceived changes in male subjects’ length of time and the accuracy of time estimates.And we use event-related potential techniques to try to explore the brains of males during the processing of female faces and the intrinsic neural mechanisms that influence time perception.Through the analysis of behavioral data,it was found that regardless of the length of time,the time reproduction results under high and low attractive face conditions are significantly longer than the medium attractive faces.In the case of high attractive faces,the replicating time is longer than the low attractive faces only in the long and short time intervals,and there is no significant difference between the two in the medium time interval.In addition,the error value of the time estimation decreases with the increase of the time interval under the high and low attractive faces.Regardless of the time interval,the error value of the time estimation under the high attractive face conditions is greater than the middle and low attractive faces.The mid-attractive face’s estimate of time over medium and short time is less than the low attractive face,but it rises significantly over long distances,similar to the latter.The results of EEG showed that the P1 and P2 components only showed the main effect of face attraction.The amplitude under the high attractive face was significantly higher than that of the low attractive and medium attractive faces,and the amplitude of the low attractive face was also Higher than medium attractive faces.On the N170 component,there were no significant differences in short-term distances between different attractive faces.At medium time intervals,the amplitude of the low attractive face is significantly larger than that of the high and medium attractive faces,but the difference between the latter two is not significant.In the long time interval,the N170 amplitudes of the high and low attractive faces are significantly larger than the medium attractive faces.At the same time,the high attractive face can induce the N170 amplitude significantly longer than the medium and short time interval in the long time interval,while The amplitude of the low-attractive face is not significant at different time intervals,although the amplitude of the medium-distance is greater than the length of the two.This leads to the following conclusions:Ⅰ)Face attractiveness affects an individual’s temporal perception,as evidenced by the length of time estimates and the accuracy of time estimates.Ⅱ)Attention plays a role in the process of face attraction affecting time perception.Individuals have an attention preference for high and low attractive faces in the early processing stage.Compared with the medium attractive faces,the individual’s perception of the current time interval of the high and low attractive faces is shorter,and the time estimation accuracy of the high attractive faces is lower.Ⅲ)The influence of face attractiveness on time perception is regulated by time interval.The estimation of the current time interval of middle and low attractive faces decreases with increasing time interval,and the time estimation accuracy of the former is the lowest in long time distance;However the high attractive face is not affected by the time interval,and always shows the underestimation of the current time interval and the lower time estimation accuracy.