Abstract
People may have aesthetic desires or negative feelings about their faces and feel a gap between their body image and actual appearance. Previous studies have shown that general people visually recognize their eye size as larger than the actual (Hine & Okubo, 2021; Wen & Kawabata, 2014). However, it is unclear whether this cognitive tendency occurs in people with high self-face dissatisfaction. This study aimed to investigate whether the cognitive size of one's own and others' eyes differs according to the degrees of self-face dissatisfaction. Thirty-two college students (5 males, 27 females; age: 21.3±2.11) were asked to respond to a Face Dissatisfaction Scale (FDS; Ito et al., 2019) and a two-alternative forced-choice task. The task was to choose whether their friends' eyes or themselves in the face photos with changed eye size were larger or smaller than their actual. The cognitively equivalent eye size to the actual one was estimated from a psychophysical function. We conducted a correlation analysis of the total scores on the FDS and the point of subjective equality (PSE) of eye size. As a result, there was a high negative correlation between the FDS and the PSE of own eye size (r = -.66, p < .001). There was a high positive correlation between the FDS and the PSE for all others' faces (r = .54~.75, p < .001). Moreover, a two-way ANOVA was conducted for the PSE with self-face dissatisfaction and judgments for self/others' eyes as factors. The result suggested that people with high self-face dissatisfaction recognized their eyes as smaller and others' eyes larger than their actual size. People with low self-face dissatisfaction recognized their own and others' eye sizes almost as same as the actual. We concluded that cognitive disturbance to self and other faces is related to higher levels of self-face dissatisfaction.