Liking the Look, but Looking Less? Relative Evaluative Compatibility and Early Orienting to Opposite-Gender Beautified Faces

The widespread use of beauty-enhancement technology has raised questions about how beautified faces are evaluated and prioritized during attentional processing. This study combined an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and a dot-probe task to examine relative evaluative compatibility and attentional responses to beautified and non-beautified (original) synthetic same-gender (female) and opposite-gender (male) target faces among 45 heterosexual female university students. The results showed greater relative compatibility for the beautified-positive/original-negative mapping than for the reversed mapping, while evidence that this compatibility effect varied by target face gender remained inconclusive. Furthermore, participants showed early attentional orienting toward opposite-gender beautified faces at 100 ms, whereas the reversed validity pattern at 500 ms was not statistically significant. Additionally, the opposite-gender D-score was negatively associated with the opposite-gender 100 ms attention-bias index. Given the well-documented psychometric constraints of reaction-time difference scores in dot-probe tasks, this individual-difference association should be treated as preliminary and requires further replication. In the present sample, the direction of this association was compatible with a habituation-based account, although exposure history and habituation were not directly assessed. These findings provide evidence concerning relative evaluative compatibility and early attentional responses to beautified versus non-beautified synthetic faces in heterosexual female university students.