A “Closer Look” at Subliminal Facial Attractiveness and Beyond

Facial attractiveness is an important human characteristic. It impacts our personal and interpersonal lives from a very young age and throughout our adulthood in most aspects of our experiences, actions and interactions. Evolutionary and sociobiological hypotheses, findings and interpretations have been posited to explain why facial attractiveness is important for human interactions. For example, facial symmetry, averageness and above-average secondary/dimorphic sexual characteristics have been proposed to indicate hormonal and health markers for relational attraction. These traits are considered universal evolutionary important biological markers. Therefore, the hypothesis that attractiveness is processed unconsciously – i.e., subliminally – has been proposed and supported by the vast majority of topical research. In this manuscript, we employ mathematical, statistical, methodological, psychophysical and psychophysiological state-of-the-art advances; we dispute subliminality, and we redefine the roles of consciousness, unconsciousness, and involuntary and automatic responses relating to facial attractiveness. We demonstrate that attraction in response to human faces involves both conscious and unconscious elements, that it is, indeed, automatic and involuntary, and that it can be behaviourally but not experientially inhibited by conscious interference.