Seeking the ‚ÄúBeauty Center‚Ä?in the Brain: A Meta-Analysis of fMRI Studies of Beautiful Human Faces and Visual Art
Authors: Simon B Eickhoff
Hu Chuan-Peng
Kaiping Peng
Jie Sui
Yi Huang
Journal: Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience (2020)
Discipline: NEUROSCIENCE & BEHAVIOR
Keywords: Activation likelihood estimation; Beauty; Faces; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Visual art.
Affiliations: Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People's Republic of China. ., Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research (LIR), Mainz, Germany. ., Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People's Republic of China., School of Business and Management, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, People's Republic of China., Institute of Systems Neuroscience, Medical Faculty, Heinrich Heine University D√ºsseldorf, D√ºsseldorf, Germany., Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Brain & Behaviour (INM-7), Research Centre J√ºlich, J√ºlich, Germany., School of Psychology, the University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK.

Abstract:  During the past two decades, cognitive neuroscientists have sought to elucidate the common neural basis of the experience of beauty. Still, empirical evidence for such common neural basis of different forms of beauty is not conclusive. To address this question, we performed an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis on the existing neuroimaging studies of beauty appreciation of faces and visual art by nonexpert adults (49 studies, 982 participants, meta-data are available at https://osf.io/s9xds/ ). We observed that perceiving these two forms of beauty activated distinct brain regions: While the beauty of faces convergently activated the left ventral striatum, the beauty of visual art convergently activated the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC). However, a conjunction analysis failed to reveal any common brain regions for the beauty of visual art and faces. The implications of these results are discussed. 

Retracted: No

PubPeer comments:
 This article was reviewed on the error bar podcast episode 3: https: theerrorbar.com ?e=3. The review was done in the light of newspaper headlines about the article. The slightly-edited transcript is copied here: headline: BEAUTY IS IN THE BRAIN. OR ISN T. tweet: a meta-analysis of 49 brain imaging studies finds that different parts of the brain are involved in the appreciation of the visual beauty of arts and of faces. there s no beauty centre description: in case relationship breakups and the brain basis of loneliness weren t enough to bring you down, Scientific American reviews a brain imaging study published in October last year, concluding that there is no beauty centre in the brain. the researcher team from China, Germany and Scotland, searched for all of the published studies that had scanned peoples brains while they were looking at beautiful things like art, or people s faces, and compared them to less-beautiful things. comparing beautiful and less-beautiful things in each study had resulted in some areas of the brain being more active than others combining all the faces and all the arts studies revealed two regions of common responsiveness - one for faces and one for arts. the face beauty region was in the prefrontal cortex - that s an important part of the brain that we heard about in the last episode to do with obsessive compulsive behaviours. the art beauty region was, err, also in the prefrontal cortex, but a slightly different location. there was no overlap at all - there is no beauty region in the brain. evaluation: the study seems to be quite sensible and reliable, statistically-speaking. but if you really want to find a brain area for beauty - if that will make you happy - then you can cling on to some unavoidable drawbacks of this kind of meta-analysis: the meta-analysis is only as good as the individual studies that were included in it, and no specific assessment of study quality was reported. and the meta-analysis was based only on the peak activations in each study, rather than all of the raw data. if you need there to be a common brain area for beauty, then you can hope that all the missing brain activity would somehow sum up to create a brain blob for beauty. conclusion: looking at images and considering how beautiful they are will produce consistent responses in specific parts of the brain. but those parts depend on the kind of images. there s no brain area for beauty. ,