The concepts of beauty and the creation of art have been around for a lot longer than the study of neuroscience. A new field in neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, aims to study the neural experiences of art and bridge the two subjects and has begun to explore these experiences in many ways. New research has started looking for explanations as to why certain art is favored by the public, investigated architectural structures through history, and inquired about the impact that art can have on a person. Although more recent education teaches younger generations to not judge others based on their appearances, Marcus J. Glennon and colleagues investigate one’s assumptions of others in their 2022 article “The Power of External Influences to Modify Judgments of Facial and Moral Beauty”. “Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder or an Objective Truth? A Neuroscientific Answer”, explores beauty from an evolutionary perspective and defines objectivity in multiple ways with Norberto Grzywacz and colleagues.
Glennon and colleagues aimed to determine whether it was possible to separate facial and moral beauty. This was done by looking at faces and rating them on a standing of facial beauty and moral goodness. The participants were then presented with “Fictitious peer rating for the same face and asked to re-rate the face”. The goodness and beauty ratings have a strong positive correlation and shows the more beauty one has, the higher moral goodness they are perceived to have. Ultimately it was evaluated that goodness ratings were more likely to change than beauty ratings. They divided facial and moral beauty due to this difference in vulnerability to external factors. This can be related to valued characteristics in history in addition to pop-culture beauty expectations of the time.
In contrast to opinions about people, Grzywacz and colleagues studied whether art was beautiful objectively based on their factors or simply one’s subjective opinions. They hypothesized both pieces of the investigation- objective and subjective- “lie within the perceiver’s brain” (Aleem 109). They concluded that beauty “values” are built both objectively through evolutionary preferences and subjectively on an individualized scale. The objective pieces of beauty are universal biases that are modified through learning. They used a few methods to define objective and subjective truths and for the purpose of this specific study they used “universality of response in human observers” (Aleem109). This could be transferable with Glennon's study as it found strong trends and correlations; it could be argued that their findings are also objective. There are subjective aspects of judgment, but when the judgments become the same over large populations, under this definition it could be considered objective. The mention of the processing fluency theory by Grzywacz can also be applied to the work of Glennon. The processing fluency theory is one explanation for the trends that things are more appealing to the human eye when they are easier for the brain to process (Aleem 102). Because of this ability to process certain traits easier, there is an innate preference for things like symmetry or things that are well-proportioned or balanced. While these were explained in art, these are also characteristics that can label faces, making the processing fluency theory also a possible explanation for facial beauty and goodness ratings.
Research findings in neuroaesthetics may continue to find trends and evidence for the processing fluency theory. Though these two articles investigated different topics, there are conclusions that both contribute to: neuroscientific preferences can shift per person, but initial reactions can also be based on neuronal functioning.
Works Cited
Aleem, Hassan, et al. “Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder or an Objective Truth? A Neuroscientific Answer.” Springer Series on Bio- and Neurosystems, 2019, pp. 101–110., https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24326-5_11
Glennon, Marcus J., and Semir Zeki. “The Power of External Influences to Modify Judgments of Facial and Moral Beauty.” PsyCh Journal (Victoria, Australia), vol. 11, no. 5, 2022, pp. 707–14, https://doi.org/10.1002/pchj.492.
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