Toward a Social Psychophysics of Face Communication

Abstract

As a highly social species, humans are equipped with a powerful tool for social communication-the face. Although seemingly simple, the human face can elicit multiple social perceptions due to the rich variations of its movements, morphology, and complexion. Consequently, identifying precisely what face information elicits different social perceptions is a complex empirical challenge that has largely remained beyond the reach of traditional methods. In the past decade, the emerging field of social psychophysics has developed new methods to address this challenge, with the potential to transfer psychophysical laws of social perception to the digital economy via avatars and social robots. At this exciting juncture, it is timely to review these new methodological developments. In this article, we introduce and review the foundational methodological developments of social psychophysics, present work done in the past decade that has advanced understanding of the face as a tool for social communication, and discuss the major challenges that lie ahead.

Nature of Emotion Categories: Comment on Cowen and Keltner

“…In Cowen and Keltner’s study, however, each participant viewed a subsample of the available movie clips (30 of the 2185 available), allowing the possibility of treating clips as a random-effects variable. Cowen and Keltner did not explicitly estimate stimulus variability and adjust for uncertainty due to stimulus sampling, but future studies can (for an example of modeling stimuli as a random effect, see [3]). Also of note, the analyses were conducted on the average of the individual ratings associated with each film clip, rather than on the individual ratings themselves.…”

Dominance and competence face to face: Dissociations obtained with a reverse correlation approach

“…Reverse correlation methods have proven their usefulness in social perception research as a data-driven tool to probe a perceiver's a priori expectations (or internal representations) about their social world (for a review see Brinkman, Todorov, & Dotsch, 2017;Jack & Schyns, 2017). These methods allow the identification of face configurations that are diagnostic of specific social judgments.…”

“…The noise generation procedure was identical to the one reported in Dotsch and Todorov (2012). The randomness of the task stimuli circumvents a priori assumptions made about the facial content associated with any of the target trait dimensions (Gosselin & Schyns, 2003;Jack & Schyns, 2017). The base image was the grayscale average male face (Karolinska Face Database; Lundqvist, Flykt, & Ohman, 1998), resized to 256 9 256 pixels (Dotsch & Todorov, 2012).…”

Revisiting diversity: cultural variation reveals the constructed nature of emotion perception

“…This culture priming approach was recently employed to demonstrate that the impact of “group” facial actions on emotion perception in a target individual, previously documented in East Asians, can be produced by priming a collectivistic cultural value orientation (compared to an individualistic orientation) in Greek participants [51]. Similarly, research that reveals the internal perceptual representations of emotions via psychophysical methods [52] also underscores how culture, in-the-head, shapes emotion perception [Jack, this issue].…”