Signatures of personality on dense 3D facial images

Abstract

It has long been speculated that cues on the human face exist that allow observers to make reliable judgments of others' personality traits. However, direct evidence of association between facial shapes and personality is missing from the current literature. This study assessed the personality attributes of 834 Han Chinese volunteers (405 males and 429 females), utilising the five-factor personality model ('Big Five'), and collected their neutral 3D facial images. Dense anatomical correspondence was established across the 3D facial images in order to allow high-dimensional quantitative analyses of the facial phenotypes. In this paper, we developed a Partial Least Squares (PLS) -based method. We used composite partial least squares component (CPSLC) to test association between the self-tested personality scores and the dense 3D facial image data, then used principal component analysis (PCA) for further validation. Among the five personality factors, agreeableness and conscientiousness in males and extraversion in females were significantly associated with specific facial patterns. The personalityrelated facial patterns were extracted and their effects were extrapolated on simulated 3D facial models.As one of the most complex anthropological traits, the human facial shape is strongly regulated by many factors such as genetics, ethnicity, age, gender, and health. Due to the rapid progress of facial imaging and analysis technology, especially the 3D dense face model-based approaches, complex facial shape traits are continuously being discovered in order to signal genetic polymorphisms 1 , ethnicity 2 , gender 3 , diseases 4 , health 5 , as well as aging 6 .Apart from anthropological perspectives, the human face was also intensively studied for its social attributes; e.g. many aspects of the human personality are honestly signaled on the human face 7-9 , and many other socially relevant traits, such as attractiveness 10, 11 , aggression 12 , and sociosexuality 13 can also be identified on the human face. From an evolutionary perspective, human faces have evolved to signal individual identity 14 and served adaptive functions to promote genetic fitness 15 . Moreover, faces represent an important signaling system not only in humans, but also in chimpanzees, which accurately pictures the personality, indicating shared signaling structures across two species 7 . Nevertheless, the facial signals of social attributes are more difficult to study due to the involute and highly subjective nature of social attributes. Many people believe that facial cues exist towards the hidden personality of unknown individuals 16 . Indeed, a series of studies have been carried out to formally test the hypothesis of facial cues of personality. Most of these studies utilised the five-factor model of personality, or the 'Big Five' (BF) model [17][18][19] . The BF model ascribes the personality into five dimensions: extraversion (E), agreeableness (A), conscientiousness (C), neuroticism (N), and openness (O). According to the definitions, a high...

Genome-wide Variants of Eurasian Facial Shape Differentiation and a prospective model of DNA based Face Prediction

“…Visualization in UIG-R and HAN-CZ revealed highly consistent effects of the ancestry-divergent variants as in UIG-D 22 (Fig. 4), despite the distinct ethnicity of HAN-CZ.…”

“…Ideally, the effects of shape related loci should be directly visualized on facial images. We modeled the effects of index SNPs using heat plots as well as extrapolated faces 22 (Fig. 3, Movies S1-S6).…”