Three experiments are presented that investigate the two-dimensional valence/trustworthiness by dominance model of social inferences from faces (Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008). Experiment 1 used image averaging and morphing techniques to demonstrate that consistent facial cues subserve a range of social inferences, even in a highly variable sample of 1000 ambient images (images that are intended to be representative of those encountered in everyday life, see Jenkins, White, Van Montfort, & Burton, 2011). Experiment 2 then tested Oosterhof and Todorov's two-dimensional model on this extensive sample of face images. The original two dimensions were replicated and a novel 'youthful-attractiveness' factor also emerged. Experiment 3 successfully cross-validated the three-dimensional model using face averages directly constructed from the factor scores. These findings highlight the utility of the original trustworthiness and dominance dimensions, but also underscore the need to utilise varied face stimuli: with a more realistically diverse set of face images, social inferences from faces show a more elaborate underlying structure than hitherto suggested.

When attempting to feed on their hosts, ticks face the problem of host hemostasis (the vertebrate mechanisms that prevent blood loss), inflammation (that can produce itching or pain and thus initiate defensive behavior on their hosts) and immunity (by way of both cellular and humoral responses). Against these barriers, ticks evolved a complex and sophisticated pharmacological armamentarium, consisting of bioactive lipids and proteins, to assist blood feeding. Recent progress in transcriptome research has uncovered that hard ticks have hundreds of different proteins expressed in their salivary glands, the majority of which have no known function, and include many novel protein families (e.g., their primary structure is unique to ticks). This review will address the vertebrate mechanisms of these barriers as a guide to identify the possible targets of these large numbers of known salivary proteins with unknown function. We additionally provide a supplemental table that catalogues over 3,500 putative salivary proteins from various tick species, which might assist the scientific community in the process of functional identification of these unique proteins. This supplemental file is accessble from http://exon.niaid.nih.gov/transcriptome/tick_review/Sup-Table-1.xls.gz.

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Background. Previous behavioural and neuroimaging studies of emotion processing in autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) have focused on the use of facial stimuli. To date, however, no studies have examined emotion processing in autism across a broad range of social signals.Method. This study addressed this issue by investigating emotion processing in a group of 23 adults with ASD and 23 age-and gender-matched controls. Recognition of basic emotions (' happiness ', ' sadness ', ' anger ', disgust' and ' fear ') was assessed from facial, body movement and vocal stimuli. The ability to make social judgements (such as approachability) from facial stimuli was also investigated.Results. Significant deficits in emotion recognition were found in the ASD group relative to the control group across all stimulus domains (faces, body movements and voices). These deficits were seen across a range of emotions. The ASD group were also impaired in making social judgements compared to the control group and this correlated with impairments in basic emotion recognition.Conclusions. This study demonstrates that there are significant and broad-ranging deficits in emotion processing in ASD present across a range of stimulus domains and in the auditory and visual modality ; they cannot therefore be accounted for simply in terms of impairments in face processing or in the visual modality alone. These results identify a core deficit affecting the processing of a wide range of emotional information in ASD, which contributes to the impairments in social function seen in people with this condition. IntroductionAutism, as defined by DSM-IV criteria, is a developmental disorder characterized by difficulties in social interaction, a restricted repetitive range of interests and behaviours and impairments in verbal and nonverbal communication. There is a broad clinical phenotype that encompasses a wide range of behaviour and degrees of global intellectual impairment. This results in a diverse clinical population, generally described as having an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Individuals on the autism spectrum who do not show global intellectual impairment are commonly referred to as having high-functioning autism (HFA) if they have a history of significant language delay and Asperger syndrome (AS) if they do not. For adults with HFA/AS it is the difficulties in social communication and interaction that are frequently the most debilitating.Studies have identified deficits in facial emotion recognition in both children (C...

Summary Studies of face processing have begun to elucidate the brain regions involved in social cognition, which include frontal and temporal regions known to be reduced in volume in schizophrenia. In this case-control study participants with schizophrenia (n=20) showed marked deficits in their ability to interpret social cues from faces, and those experiencing positive symptoms were impaired in recognising even basic facial emotions.

Judgments about personality and other social characteristics based on facial appearance are remarkably consistent across individuals. However, whereas the facial cues that underpin age and sex judgments are already well understood, the physical bases for judgments of characteristics such as intelligence or trustworthiness are still unknown. Inversion and photographic negation are used here to investigate the visual processes underlying social inferences from the face and to explore whether various judgments might rely on different perceptual representations. In experiment 1, the perceptions of age, sex, attractiveness, approachability, intelligence, and trustworthiness, but not distinctiveness, were affected by inversion, and all these characteristics were affected by negation. The effects of inversion and negation were independent, suggesting that they impaired the encoding of different types of information. Moreover, an independent manipulation of hue and luminance in experiment 2 showed that the effects of negation were mainly due to the reversal of luminance values. These results are consistent with the view that information about the configuration of features (the processing of which is impaired by inversion) and information about surface properties (the processing of which is impaired by brightness negation) are both used in the perception of social characteristics from faces. In addition, the fact that there was a similar pattern of impairment across most judgments suggests that there is an initial common perceptual representation of the face, from which most characteristics are inferred.

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Two experiments investigated the role that different face regions play in a variety of social judgements that are commonly made from facial appearance (sex, age, distinctiveness, attractiveness, approachability, trustworthiness, and intelligence). These judgements lie along a continuum from those with a clear physical basis and high consequent accuracy (sex, age) to judgements that can achieve a degree of consensus between observers despite having little known validity (intelligence, trustworthiness). Results from Experiment 1 indicated that the face's internal features (eyes, nose, and mouth) provide information that is more useful for social inferences than the external features (hair, face shape, ears, and chin), especially when judging traits such as approachability and trustworthiness. Experiment 2 investigated how judgement agreement was affected when the upper head, eye, nose, or mouth regions were presented in isolation or when these regions were obscured. A different pattern of results emerged for different characteristics, indicating that different types of facial information are used in the various judgements. Moreover, the informativeness of a particular region/feature depends on whether it is presented alone or in the context of the whole face. These findings provide evidence for the importance of holistic processing in making social attributions from facial appearance.

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