Beautiful faces have variable reward value: fMRI and behavioral evidence.

By Itzhak Aharon, N. Etcoff, Dan Ariely, Christopher F. Chabris, E. O'Connor, H. Breiter. Neuron, 2001

1,162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/210e78aec8496d5a7f421dc0f1d1e35aed990d21

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Citations in the corpus

A region of mesial prefrontal cortex tracks monetarily rewarding outcomes: characterization with rapid event-related fMRI (2003, background): “Consistent with the postulated role of the mesial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) in representing internal information, researchers have documented activation of this region during presentation of rewarding stimuli such as attractive faces (Aharon et al., 2001) and pleasant music (Blood et al.”
The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty. (2006, background): “Attractive faces activate reward centers in the brain (Aharon et al. 2001, O’Doherty et al. 2003), they motivate sexual behavior and the development of same-sex alliances (Berscheid & Reis 1998, Berscheid & Walster 1974, Feingold 1990, Rhodes et al. 2005c, Thornhill & Gangestad 1999), and they…”
The social re-orientation of adolescence: a neuroscience perspective on the process and its relation to psychopathology (2005, background): “…as their own children or romantic partners (Bartels & Zeki, 2001; Leibenluft et al. 2004; Nitschke et al. 2004) individuals perceived as attractive (Aharon et al. 2001; Kampe et al. 2001; O’Doherty et al. 2003), erotic stimuli (Karama et al. 2002; Hamann et al. 2004), or faces displaying fearful…”
Neural correlates of behavioral preference for culturally familiar drinks. (2004, background): “Because of these con-al., 2001; Aharon et al., 2001).”
Social and monetary reward learning engage overlapping neural substrates. (2012, background): “In the case of experienced utility for social rewards, several studies found that activity in the OFC correlates with the perceived attractiveness of faces (Aharon et al., 2001; O'Doherty et al., 2003a; Cloutier et al., 2008; Smith et al., 2010).”
Neuropeptidergic regulation of affiliative behavior and social bonding in animals. (2006, background): “Another fMRI experiment found that even simply viewing beautiful faces has reward value and activates the NAcc (Aharon et al., 2001), demonstrating that positive salient social stimuli, in this case, visual, can activate reward areas.”
Affective Judgments of Faces Modulate Early Activity (∼160 ms) within the Fusiform Gyri (2002, background): “The present findings of greater liked than disliked activity may reflect neuronal processing biases in brain reward circuits (ventral striatum, particularly nucleus accumbens), which have been recently found to be activated by attractive faces (Aharon et al., 2001; Kampe et al., 2001).”
A neurobehavioral model of affiliative bonding: implications for conceptualizing a human trait of affiliation. (2005, background): “For example, Breiter et al. (2001) and Aharon et al. (2001) have shown that even passive viewing of attractive female faces unconditionally activates the anatomical areas that integrate reward, incentive motivation, and approach in heterosexual males.”
Dissociating the Role of the Orbitofrontal Cortex and the Striatum in the Computation of Goal Values and Prediction Errors (2008, background): “This is an important result for neuroeconomics and behavioral neuroscience because the interpretation of ventral striatal activity as reflecting goal values is fairly widespread (Aharon et al., 2001; Knutson et Table 2.”
Feeling Good About Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior (2009, background): “Results showed that donations of the original one-hundred dollar sum to the food bank led to activation in the ventral striatum, a brain region associated with representing the value of a range of rewarding stimuli, from cocaine to art to attractive faces (Aharon et al., 2001; Vartanian & Goel, 2004”
The MAD Model of Moral Contagion: The Role of Motivation, Attention, and Design in the Spread of Moralized Content Online (2019, background): “…areas of the brain associated with reward such as the striatum are highly active and overlap with brain areas associated with nonsocial reward (Aharon et al., 2004; Izuma, Saito, & Sadato, 2008; Meshi, Morawetz, & Heekeren, 2013; Nitschke et al., 2004; Sherman, Payton, Hernandez, Greenfield,…”