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Attractiveness is a concept long studied by psychologists, and of interest to many lay people, as it influences our perception of others. Two evolutionary principles, sexual dimorphism and facial contrast, drove this research to explore the effects of attractiveness from the perception of both young and older adults. Many features of the face have been studied before, such as eyes and lips, but this research seeks to understand the importance of eyebrows on attractiveness. In this study, different conditions of eyebrows were manipulated to enhance certain features, such as the thickness, thinness, darkness, and lightness of the eyebrows. Both young adult (college students) and older adults were asked to participate in this study. Participants were shown 100 images and then asked to rate how attractive they perceived each face. Young adults rated the lighter eyebrow conditions as less attractive, consistent with theories of sexual dimorphism. Older adults preferred thicker eyebrows, which was inconsistent with the hypothesis. Overall, both the young and older adults rated the original eyebrow condition as more attractive, indicating a preference for more naturally looking eyebrows. Results were closely supported by the current trends of eyebrows and exemplifies the significance of current trends and cultural differences on perceived attractiveness in society.

The pop culture phenomenon of resting bitch face has been discussed frequently through anecdotal and observational evidence. However, it has not been formally studied as a perceptual bias. In this study, we hypothesized that gender would affect perception of emotion and thatparticipants would rate women’s neutral resting faces more negatively than men’s neutral restingfaces. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed data from 90 participants who completed an online survey containing 156 trials of face stimuli. These faces included happiness, disgust, and neutral facial emotions. The data collected in this study revealed that the main effects of the variables sex of face and emotion were significant. The interaction between sex of face and emotion was also statisticallysignificant. Planned contrasts revealed that women’s neutral resting faces were rated more negatively than men’s neutral resting faces, women’s disgust faces were also rated more negatively than men’s disgust faces, and female happy expressions were judged as slightly more positive than male’s happy expressions. We also found an effect of gender of the participants for the disgust emotion, as women rated the emotion of disgust more negative compared to men. Therefore, we conclude that there is a significant difference between how expressions of emotion are rated based on gender, and the gender of the participant may also have small effect on perception. Thus, the pop culture phenomenon of resting bitch face can be defined as a perceptual bias related to gender, and there are other gender-based biases that should be studied more extensively. Understanding perceptual biases are key to creating awareness of how implicit judgements impact daily behavior and treatment of specific populations.

This study measured the predictive capabilities of metamemory on memory performance and false memory occurrences in associative and category word lists. Metamemory was assessed using Factors 1 and 2 from theSelf-evaluation of Memory Systems Questionnaire (SMSQ)and judgements of learning using a betting paradigm. The results indicated a lack of relationship between how someone rated their memory and how they performed on a free recall task. However, the results indicated unique differences when analyzing the word lists separately. The inclusion of JOLs significantly increased the predictive capacity of the model for both types of word lists when the outcome variable was proportion correct of memory performance, however, was only significant for associative word lists when the outcome variable was false memory occurrences. These findings suggest possible differences between types of word lists in regard to false memory formation.