2021 Volume 6 Issue 1 Pages 28-36
In this paper, the author reviewed recent studies about social impressions from faces and the effect of positive expression (smile) on facial attractiveness. It is appeared that smile generally contributes to positive evaluation of facial attractiveness (in 31 studies, the majorities of 23 studies reported positive effect of smile on facial attractiveness, 8 studies reported smiles don’t have any effect on facial attractiveness). However, it is suggested that smile is not the requirement (basic/fundamental component) of facial attractiveness. Second, the author introduced recent theories about interpersonal attractiveness and discussed the similarities between recent model of facial impressions (Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008; Sutherland et al., 2013) and the fundamental model of interpersonal attractiveness, that is, the importance of the ideas of instrumentality toward perceiver’s goals/motivational states (Finkel & Eastwick, 2015). Based on this theoretical discussion, the author proposed that it is necessary for researchers of facial attractiveness to take into consideration about the interaction of these three components: perceiver’s motivational state, facial features and the information of social intentions (emotion expressions and gaze directions).
