A pretty face is never forgotten. Do you believe so? But maybe it is untrue! Psychologists believe beautiful people are less likely to be recognized. A new study suggests that attractiveness can actually prevent the recognition of faces, unless a pretty face has particularly distinctive (与众不同的) features, such as Angelina Jolie’s.
German psychologists think the recognition of pretty faces is distorted (扭曲) by emotions. Researchers Holger Wiese, Carolin Altmann and Stefan Schweinberger at the University of Jena, Germany, discovered in a study that photos of unattractive people were more easily remembered than pretty ones when they showed them to a group of people.
For the study, which was published in science magazine Neuropsychologia, the psychologists showed photos of faces to test subjects. Half of the faces were considered to be more attractive and the other half as less attractive, but all of them were being thought of as similarly distinctive looking. The test subjects were shown the faces for just a few seconds to memorize them and were shown them again during the test so that they could decide if they recognized them or not.
The researchers were surprised by the result. “Until now we assumed that it was generally easier to memorize faces which are being considered as attractive, just because we prefer looking at beautiful faces,” Dr. Wiese said. But the study showed that such a connection cannot be easily proven. He assumes that remembering pretty faces is distorted by emotional influences, which increase the sense of recognition at a later time. The researchers’ idea is backed up by evidence from EEG-recordings (脑电图记录) they used during their experiment which show the brains’ electric activity.
The study also revealed that in the case of attractive faces, considerably more false positive results were detected. In other words, people thought they recognized a face without having seen it before. “We obviously tend to believe that we recognize a face just because we find it attractive.” Dr. Wiese said.
【小题1】Where is the text probably taken from?| A．An official document. | B．A travel magazine. |
| C．A science report. | D．A history book. |
| A．They were all of pretty faces. |
| B．They were not distinctive at all. |
| C．They were selected at random. |
| D．They were showed twice to the test subjects. |
| A．Beautiful people are particularly distinctive. |
| B．People are unwilling to recognize ugly faces. |
| C．Attractiveness prevents the recognition of faces. |
| D．Attractive faces are always easy to be recognized. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Objective. | C．Favorable. | D．Disapproving. |
