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Assessment of health in human faces is context-dependent

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Whitehead_HumanFaces_BP_AM.pdf (349.4Kb)
Date
04/2016
Author
Morgan, Kate V.
Morton, Andrew
Whitehead, Ross D.
Perrett, David I.
Hurly, T. Andrew
Healy, Susan D.
Keywords
Context-dependent choice
Health perception
Decision making
RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
QH301 Biology
NDAS
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Abstract
When making decisions between options, humans are expected to choose the option that returns the highest benefit. In practice, however, adding inferior alternatives to the choice set can alter these decisions. Here we investigated whether decisions over the facial features that people find healthy looking can also be affected by the context in which they see those faces. To do this we examined the effect of choice set on the perception of health of images of faces of light-skinned Caucasian females. We manipulated apparent facial health by changing yellowness of the skin: the healthy faces were moderately yellow and the less healthy faces were either much more yellow or much less yellow. In each experiment, two healthy faces were presented along with a third, less healthy face. When the third face was much more yellow, participants chose the more yellow of the two healthy faces more often as the most healthy. However, when the third face was the least yellow, participants chose the less yellow of the two healthy faces more often. A further experiment confirmed that this result is not due to a generalised preference for an intermediate option. These results extend our understanding of context-dependent decision-making in humans, and suggest that comparative evaluation may be a common feature across many different kinds of choices that humans have to make.
Citation
Morgan , K V , Morton , A , Whitehead , R D , Perrett , D I , Hurly , T A & Healy , S D 2016 , ' Assessment of health in human faces is context-dependent ' , Behavioural Processes , vol. 125 , pp. 89-95 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2016.02.006
Publication
Behavioural Processes
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2016.02.006
ISSN
0376-6357
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2016, Publisher / the Author(s). This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at www.sciencedirect.com / https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2016.02.006
Description
This work was supported by the National Environment Research Council, UK (KM), Unilever Research & Development USA and the Economic and Social Research Council (RW, DP).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/10253

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