Exploring the link between aesthetic judgments and “screen sliding” hand movements

Humans generally evaluate the beauty of other humans, as well as that of objects, places, natural landscapes, and even animals. The innate human tendency to make aesthetic judgments has been the subject of numerous psychological studies, but its neural and cognitive underpinnings are not yet fully understood.

Linghe Li and Hanlin Wang, two researchers from Hebei Normal University, recently conducted a study exploring the symbolic relationship between aesthetic judgments and horizontal hand movements, such as those users make when browsing profiles other people on dating apps. Their article, published in Letters in neurosciencegathered new insights into the cognitive processes that might underlie human subjective evaluations of beauty.

“Our research draws inspiration from popular social apps that have emerged in recent years, such as Tinder and Tantan,” Li, the study’s lead researcher, told Medical Xpress. “These apps use swiping left or right on smartphones to allow users to choose whether they want to take the next step in contacting, communicating, and getting to know someone in a photo. We wanted to know why such an interface had been chosen and whether there is a metaphorical link between the horizontal movements of the hand and aesthetic judgment.

Many dating apps available today, including the popular Tinder app, work by allowing users to select or remove potential dates by swiping left or right on their smartphone. In these apps, swiping right on a user’s profile essentially means that one finds the person in the image physically attractive or beautiful, while swiping left means that they are not attracted to that person. person.

Li and Wang attempted to determine whether these directional hand movements were somehow implicitly associated with evaluations of beauty. Their experimental methods rely on a task called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has often been used in psychology studies to assess the automatic and potentially biased associations that humans can unconsciously make in their minds.

“Building on the logic of the IAT, we designed two joint categorical response tasks: “Judging beauty – move mouse to the left, judging ugliness – moving mouse to the right” and “Judging beauty – move the mouse to the right. judge ugliness – move the mouse to the left,'” Li explained. “We found that ‘Judge the beauty – move the mouse to the left’ was more consistent with the action-move tendency response of aesthetic judgment.”

The researchers asked a group of participants to look through images and rate the aesthetic beauty of the people depicted in them by swiping their finger left or right on their device. Notably, they performed two different experimental trials in which the instructions changed slightly, as the meaning of left or right swiping movements changed (i.e., in one trial, swipe left meant “beautiful” and to the right “unattractive”, and vice versa in the second essay). .

Li and Wang measured the time it took their participants to respond to the images (by swiping left or right) over the two trials. They also measured the brain responses that followed their aesthetic judgments about the images, using an electroencephalogram (EEG), a widely used technology that records brain activity using small sensors attached to leather hair of a study participant.

“By comparing the differences in reaction times and potential event-related components of judgments between the two conditions, we found that ‘judging beauty – going left’ was more consistent with the trend of action responses in aesthetic judgments,” Li said.

“By combining behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) results, the present study demonstrated a metaphorical association between horizontal hand actions and aesthetic judgments. It suggests that horizontal hand actions can affect the speed of aesthetic judgments by influencing processing fluency, level of emotional arousal, categorization motivation and attentional resources.

Essentially, the researchers found that when people were asked to swipe left to express that they found a person beautiful, they did so more quickly than when they were asked to express their positive evaluations by swiping down. RIGHT. This suggests that directional hand movements are to some extent cognitively and implicitly associated with people’s evaluation of beauty.

This recent study offers an interesting new perspective on the implicit connections the human mind might make between specific hand movements and aesthetic judgments, which might be in some way related to platform use of modern encounters or having played a role in their development. The results collected by Li and Wang may soon inspire other studies examining these unconscious associations in more depth.

“In the future, we would like to explore in more detail whether this tendency toward a ‘beauty on the left’ action response is due to the ‘avoidance tendency,'” Li added. “Furthermore, we would like to know whether spatial left/right affects this metaphorical connection.”

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