Abstract

Monin (2003) showed that the attractiveness of a face increases its perceived familiarity regardless of prior exposure, and suggested that this beautiful-is-familiar effect was due to the misattribution to familiarity of the positive affect (or “warm glow”) elicited by attractive faces. This research tests the alternative interpretation that an evaluative match between a positive stimulus (an attractive face) and a positive response (“familiar”) accounts for this effect in the absence of any misattribution. In a face recognition task, participants were led to signal their sense of familiarity with previously seen and unseen faces by selecting either a pleasant (affectively congruent) or unpleasant (affectively incongruent) image. Consistent with the warm glow heuristic, higher false alarm rates were obtained for more attractive distracters, and this effect survived (and was, if anything, stronger) when an affectively incongruent response format was used. These findings are discussed in the context of current face memory and perceptual fluency models.

Keywords: Face memory; Face attractiveness; Perceptual fluency; Affect; Misattribution

Article Outline

Method

Participants

Materials

Procedure

Results

General discussion

Does the beautiful-is-familiar effect only occur with new faces?

The detrimental impact of an affectively incongruent response format

Conclusion

References

We thank Raymond Bruyer, Caroline Michel, and Bruno Rossion for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.