Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 2, 1990                   TAG: 9005020069
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E6   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: MALCOLM RITTER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

STUDY: ATTRACTIVE FACES ARE REALLY JUST AVERAGE

"Averageness is probably a necessary condition for attractiveness," said researcher Judith Langlois of the University of Texas at Austin.

The bad news for ordinary Joes and Janes is that, as Langlois put it, there are "probably not that many faces that are exactly average" in the way she studied.

Langlois and a colleague used a computer to construct faces that blended facial features of up to 32 people, averaging out such features as nose length and chin prominence. In this way, the more faces that went into a composite, the more it represented an average face for the population of college-age students from which it was drawn.

When other students judged the attractiveness of the composites and of individual faces, without being told which was which, they found the composites made from 16 or 32 faces to be more attractive than the real faces that went into them. And the more faces went into a composite, the more attractive it became.

Although other factors probably make movie stars unusually handsome or beautiful, "I'll bet their faces have the fundamental attribute of averageness," Langlois said. "And without that they would not be very attractive."

"We don't know yet about all the other components of attractiveness, but I would say this is a major one, and it's a required one."

Langlois presented the study in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science with Lori Roggman, who is now at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

"I think the research is absolutely fascinating," commented University of Minnesota psychologist Ellen Berscheid.

"I would say this is about the first time anyone has even begun to unravel what the standards of beauty are," she said.

But she cautioned that the experiment involved faces of white college-age students, and said similar work must be tried with faces from other racial and age groups to see if the results still apply.

If the principle does apply generally, Langlois said, it might help dentists and surgeons in reconstructing faces shattered by accidents or disfigured by abnormalities. The average face for a person of the patient's age and race could be used as a guide for the reconstruction, she said.

The new study used faces of 192 undergraduate psychology students at the Texas university, plus the composites. For each sex, a computer built composite photos that blended two, four, eight, 16 or 32 faces.

Attractiveness was judged by a different group of 300 students using a scale of one to five, with five being the most attractive.

Male individual faces averaged a rating of 2.51, compared with 3.27 for composites of 32 male faces. For females, individual faces averaged 2.43, compared with 3.25 for 32-face composites.