El Haj, M., & Ndobo, A. (2020). Attractive memory: High destination memory for attractive faces. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.
The text is about attractiveness. Indeed, according to some studies, having an attractive face has positive consequences, such as being perceived as more noteworthy or being treated better than other people, who have unattractive faces. Moreover, attractiveness also has an influence on the face memory since research has shown that attractive faces are better recognized. Therefore, different studies have shown that attractiveness has an influence on social judgment, but it can influence face memory too. That’s why El Haj and N’Dobo (2020) wanted to work on these results, wondering if destination memory could be influenced by attractiveness of the destination. More precisely, the authors wondered about the impact of attractiveness on destination memory, i.e. the ability to remember to whom information was previously told
To evaluate this, the experiment had been organized in three phases. In the first phase, participants were shown twenty-four faces each associated with a proverb. The facial expressions were divided into three categories: attractive faces, unattractive faces and neither-attractive-nor-unattractive faces. In the second phase, the distraction task, participants were asked to read aloud strings of three-digit numbers for one minute. In the last phase, the recognition task, participants were presented twenty-four faces associated with a proverb. Twelve pairs had been studied in the first phase and twelve had not been studied. The participants were to say whether or not they pronounced the proverb with this face.
Results showed that the destination memory is different depending on the faces. More specifically, the destination memory was higher for attractive faces in comparison to neutral faces and the destination memory was higher for unattractive faces than for neutral faces. But the authors did not find a significant difference between attractive and unattractive faces.
To conclude, people tend to retain information better when their conversation partner is considered attractive or unattractive (in comparison to neutral face). According to the authors, this may be due to neural factors or a different degree of attention. These results can also be explained by the U-shaped correlation between facial recognition and attractiveness. Indeed, there seems to be fewer distinctive traits in either-attractive-nor-unattractive faces than in both attractive and unattractive faces. As a consequence, they do not provide enough clues for information retrieval.
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The study presented here is interesting because it shows that attractiveness, in addition to playing a role in social judgments, also impacts the face memory. This learning can be useful in different fields, such as social psychology, recruitment, etc. Indeed, we could interpret this result as a bias in judgment.
On the one hand, being aware of such bias could help to counter it or to better understand what is at stake during interactions, and thus it could reduce the social inequalities present in today’s society, which is an important topic in social psychology.
On the other hand, being aware that distinctive features could influence memorization can be interesting within the framework of cognitive psychology. In fact, cognitive psychology studies mental processes such as memory, language, reasoning, executive functions and attention, while at the same time making the link with behaviour and daily life.
Thus, this study is useful both in the field of social psychology and in the field of cognitive psychology.
However, judging a person as attractive or not is a subjective judgment, and therefore it depends on each individual. Actually, the article does not mention the criteria that the authors used to determine what makes a face attractive or unattractive. Therefore, it questions the way in which faces were judged as attractive, unattractive or neutral, in particular with the aim of being able to reproduce the study. This would be the main element we would consider a limit to the impact of this study.
Another limitation of the current study is the sample size. Indeed, only forty-one students participated in the study, so caution must be exercised in the results and their interpretation. Therefore we believe that it would be appropriate to replicate this study with a larger sample to obtain significant results.
Vocabulary :
- Noteworthy : marquant, remarquable
- U-shaped : courbe en forme de U
- Neither-attractive-nor-attractive : ni attractif ni pas attractif / neutre
- At stake : en jeu
- Distinctive features: traits distinctifs
Virginie BELLOEIL, Faustine BLANDIN, Océane DOUSSIN