Abstract
In recent years, short-form videos have been exploding on social media. People are addicted to taking vibrant, dynamic selfie videos instead of static selfies. We hypothesized that it is the vividness in videos, compared with static pictures, making people more appealing. Therefore, the present research aimed to investigate whether vitality made dynamic faces more attractive than static ones. We obtained face stimuli from social networks and generated them into three different motion state faces (dynamic, static, and dynamic faces played in scrambled frames). Participants rated the attractiveness (Experiment 1&2), vitality (Experiment 1&2), and subjective processing fluency (Experiment 2) of these faces and were primed with different labels of vitality (high, low, and non) in Experiment 2. As expected, dynamic faces had greater vitality and higher attractiveness than static ones. High-vitality labels made faces more attractive than low-vitality labels. Furthermore, vitality rather than subjective processing fluency mediated the relationship between motion states and facial attractiveness. In Experiment 3, we further examined whether the vitality effect could be generalized to other stimuli. We adopted videos of humans, plants, animals, and inanimate objects as stimuli and generated them into two motion states (dynamic and static). Again, we found vitality mediated the relationship between motion states and facial attractiveness regardless of stimuli type. These results indicate that vitality is an essential factor that accounts for the more attractiveness of dynamic stimuli than static ones.