The Effects of Image Resolution and Exposure Duration on Facial Beauty and Ugliness Evaluations

The beauty or ugliness of a face is affected by factors such as the resolution of the face image presented on the screen and its presentation time. However, details regarding the effect of the relationship between image resolution and presentation time are unclear. The present study investigated the effects of image resolution and presentation time on the beauty and ugliness evaluations of face images processed with down-sampling and Gaussian blurring. We prepared two types of face images with these blur processing treatments and conducted two experiments to evaluate beauty and ugliness perceptions at various presentation times. The data were analyzed using linear mixed models. We found that in both cases of blurring, the more the blurring, the lower the facial beauty and the higher the ugliness perceived. We also found that the shorter the presentation time, the higher the facial beauty and the lower the ugliness perceived. The results suggest that a positive bias may occur when sufficient temporal information is unavailable, whereas a negative bias may occur when sufficient image information is unavailable, regardless of the blurring processing method used.