Magnet, Magnet in the Wall, who is the Fairest/Scariest of Them All? The neural correlates of attractiveness and formidability perception of the male faces and bodies

• DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/sfx5e
• Publication Date: 2024-01-30T05:00:53Z
• Authors: Vít Třebický; Petr Adámek; Žaneta Pátková; Dominika Grygarová; Jitka Třebická Fi...; Jan Havlicek

Previous studies show that men and women attend to visual cues during the perception of others, and their conscious/explicit judgments strongly agree in inferring socially relevant characteristics such as formidability and attractiveness. Although the adaptive evolution of neural substrates facilitating this perception was hypothesized, relatively little is known about how neural systems underlie the perception. Using fMRI, we explored the proposed neural processes (e.g., activation of distinct brain regions) involved in the assessments of male quality in the context of male intrasexual and intersexual competition and compared differences in explicit ratings and psychophysiological processes involved in their formation.Seventy-five raters (men and women) took part in the neuroimaging and rating sessions, where they assessed sets of male facial and body images on both attractiveness and formidability while their brain activity was recorded. While we observed no sex differences in explicit ratings, the fMRI results did show context-dependent and sex-specific differences in brain activations underlying assessments of male quality. Compared to attractiveness, formidability perception involved the primary somatosensory cortex, supplementary motor area, and areas active in self-referential processing. During the formidability rating, men exhibited considerable differences in neural activation across the whole brain compared to women. In women, the formidability rating did not elicit any additional activations contrasted to attractiveness.This insight into the comparison of brain activity during sexual selection-related social perception of faces and bodies of men beyond evidence commonly acquired by solely explicit ratings provides support for the existence of hypothesized evolved neuro-cognitive complexes involved in social assessments.