This paper introduces a refined evaluation function, called Φ, for the Minimum Linear Arrangement problem (MinLA). Compared with the classical evaluation function (LA), Φ integrates additional information contained in an arrangement to distinguish arrangements with the same LA value. The main characteristics of Φ are analyzed and its practical usefulness is assessed within both a Steepest Descent (SD) algorithm and a Memetic Algorithm (MA). Experiments show that the use of Φ allows to boost the performance of SD and MA, leading to the improvement on some previous best known solutions.