WHAT MAKES MONA LISA SMILE? INVESTIGATING A HALO MODEL OF CONFIGURAL FACE EFFECTS

Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is often celebrated for her enigmatic expression, somewhere in between happy and sad. Changes in Mona Lisa’s mouth (by superimposing noise on it) have been shown to affect separate ratings of the eyes regarding their happy or sad character, despite these being physically unaltered. Like many other configural face effects, this one has been taken at face value as illustrating a mouth-eyes interaction. The present study investigates an alternative explanation based on the weighted averaging halo model of IIT (Anderson, 1981), which assumes no interaction among components. The issue of context effects has always been present in the study of faces. Typically, context information makes reference to context outside the face, acknowledging the fact that faces seldom stand in isolation but are commonly met instead in rich interactive settings. The ubiquity of outer contexts also draws attention to the fact that, however important as a communicative device, the face is one of manifold channels of communicative signs (e.g., postures, gestures, prosody, proxemics, verbal utterances, etc.). By far, the dominant question posed by research has concerned the relative importance of contextual information (regardin