Facial first impressions from another angle: How social judgements are influenced by changeable and invariant facial properties

Abstract

First impressions made to photographs of faces can depend as much on momentary characteristics of the photographed image (within-person variability) as on consistent properties of the face of the person depicted (between-person variability). Here, we examine two important sources of within-person variability: emotional expression and viewpoint. We find more within-person variability than between-person variability for social impressions of key traits of trustworthiness, dominance, and attractiveness, which index the main dimensions in theoretical models of facial impressions. The most important source of this variability is the emotional expression of the face, but the viewpoint of the photograph also affects impressions and modulates the effects of expression. For example, faces look most trustworthy with a happy expression when they are facing the perceiver, compared to when they are facing elsewhere, whereas the opposite is true for anger and disgust. Our findings highlight the integration of these different sources of variability in social impression formation.

Do facial first impressions reflect a shared social reality?

“…() and Sutherland, Young, et al . () failed to find an overall dominance factor, similar to our finding that competence was more robust than dominance across observers. Finally, Zebrowitz et al .…”

“…Interestingly, although we had initially assumed that competence and dominance would form one dimension, competence and dominance instead appeared to split for half of the participants (Table ; see also Sutherland, Oldmeadow, et al ., ; Sutherland, Young, et al ., ). That is, eleven participants showed a combined competence/dominance dimension, and a further nine either had a competence‐only dimension (six people, including intelligence), a dominance‐only dimension (one person), or both dimensions (two people).…”

“…Possibly, there is more agreement for factors that include more directly observable facial qualities. Age and attractiveness are clearly visible in the face (Rhodes, ), and trustworthiness is strongly influenced by emotional expression (Sutherland, Young, et al ., ), whereas dominance or (especially) competence may simply be less obviously visual (also argued by Hehman et al ., ).…”

“…A set of two hundred images of unfamiliar faces (100 female) were chosen at random from a larger image data set containing 1,000 face images collected from the Internet and used in previous work (Santos & Young, , , ; Sutherland et al ., ). Naturalistic images were used to capture the variation in potential social cues present when observing others in everyday life or when browsing online (Jenkins, White, Van Montfort, & Burton, ; Sutherland, Young, & Rhodes, ; discuss the importance of using naturalistic face images).…”

Eye Gaze and Head Posture Jointly Influence Judgments of Dominance, Physical Strength, and Anger

“…Changes of faces and heads across time and space may provide more valid information to the perceivers (McArthur and Baron, 1983;Zebrowitz, 2011). In daily interactions, heads are viewed in multiple positions or, in other words, in multiple postures (Jenkins et al, 2011;Rule, Ambady, & Adams, 2009;Sutherland, Young, & Rhodes, 2017;Todorov & Porter, 2014) and with different gazes (Tipper & Bayliss, 2011). These two nonverbal cues, posture and gaze, are a part of social status displays (Chiao et al, 2008;Chiao, 2010).…”