Inferring social attributes from different face regions: Evidence for holistic processing

Abstract

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.

Modeling first impressions from highly variable facial images

“…It is clear that social traits can be signaled through multiple covarying cues, and this is consistent with findings that no particular region of the face is absolutely essential to making reliable social inferences (24).…”

“…This result was in fact also apparent in Table 1, where the "jaw height" feature (no. 21 in Table 1) was the among the "top 5" positive correlations with youthful-attractiveness (together with the four eye-related features we listed previously), and the other jawline features (22)(23)(24) were all in the "top 11. "…”

“…1 provides an overview of the methods. To quantify first impressions, we used a database of 1,000 highly variable ambient face photographs of adults of overall Caucasian appearance, which had been previously rated for a variety of social traits by observers with a Western cultural background (21)(22)(23)(24). We focused on first impressions of Caucasian-looking faces by participants with a Western upbringing to avoid possible confounding influences of "other-race" effects (25,26).…”

“…Each of the ambient faces had been rated for 16 social trait impressions, as reported in previous work (21)(22)(23)(24). Briefly (Fig.…”

The neuropsychology of first impressions: Evidence from Huntington's disease

“…From ratings of the perceived trustworthiness of these 1,000 face photographs established in previous studies (Santos & Young, 2005;Santos & Young, 2008;Santos & Young, 2011;Sutherland, et al, 2013;Sutherland, et al, 2015) the 15 male faces with lowest rated trustworthiness and the 15 male faces with highest rated trustworthiness were selected, subject to constraints that the photographs included no spectacles, were sufficiently close to frontal view that both eyes were visible, showed no beards or moustaches, and that there were no more than two faces with hats in each set. These constraints were introduced only to allow the creation of relatively sharp averaged images.…”