What gives a face its gender?

Emotion in the neutral face: a mechanism for impression formation?

The current work examined contributions of emotion-resembling facial cues to impression formation. There exist common facial cues that make people look emotional, male or female, and from which we derive personality inferences. We first conducted a Pilot Study to assess these effects. We found that neutral female versus neutral male faces were rated as more submissive, affiliative, naïve, honest, cooperative, babyish, fearful, happy, and less angry than neutral male faces. In our Primary Study, we then "warped" these same neutral faces over their corresponding anger and fear displays so the resultant facial appearance cues now structurally resembled emotion while retaining a neutral visage (e.g., no wrinkles, furrows, creases, etc.). The gender effects found in the Pilot Study were replicated in the Primary Study, suggesting clear stereotype-driven impressions. Critically, ratings of the neutral-over-fear warps versus neutral-over-anger warps also revealed a profile similar to the gender-based ratings, revealing perceptually driven impressions directly attributable to emotion overgeneralisation.

Categorization in ASD: The Role of Typicality and Development

There is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) differ in the way in which they cognitively process information. A critical aspect of cognitive processing that is receiving more attention in studies of ASD is categorization. The studies presented here examined the effect of typicality on categorization of objects and gender in high-functioning children, adolescents, and adults with ASD and matched controls. The ASD and control groups showed improved categorization throughout the lifespan for typical and somewhat typical object category members and typical gender faces. However, individuals with ASD took more time to categorize atypical object category members and were less accurate in categorizing atypical gender faces from 8-12 years through adulthood. The implications of these results for teaching categories and category labels to individuals with ASD will be discussed.

SHIFTING THE PROTOTYPE: EXPERIENCE WITH FACES INFLUENCES AFFECTIVE AND ATTRACTIVENESS PREFERENCES

While some researchers have suggested that preferences for attractive faces are the result of a domain-specific beauty detection module, others argue these preferences develop based on averages of stimuli through a domain-general learning mechanism. We tested whether cognitive and perceptual mechanisms sensitive to experience underlie facial preferences by familiarizing participants with human, chimpanzee, or morphed faces (60%-chimp/40%-human). Results indicated that participants familiarized with human-chimp morphs showed greater zygomaticus major activity, a physiological correlate of positive affect (Study 1), and higher explicit attractiveness ratings (Study 2) to faces morphed to some degree with chimpanzees. These results demonstrate that experience shifts attractiveness preferences away from the normative average, and suggest that a domain-general cognitive mechanism better accounts for facial preferences than a domain-specific innate beauty-detector.

On the Nature of Gender Categorization

In the present paper, relying on event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we investigated the automatic nature of gender categorization focusing on different stages of the ongoing process. In particular, we explored the degree to which gender categorization occurs automatically by manipulating the semantic vs. nonsemantic processing goals requested by the task (Study 1) and the complexity of the task itself (Study 2). Results of Study 1 highlighted the automatic nature of categorization at an early (N170) and on a later processing stage (P300). Findings of Study 2 showed that at an early stage categorization was automatically driven by the ease of extraction of category-based knowledge from faces while, at a later stage, categorization was more influenced by situational constrains.

Is it a he or a she? Behavioral and computational approaches to sex categorization

Can people categorize the sex of neonate faces? Our experiment tested the sex categorization of neonate faces by adult participants. We used a set of 120 Caucasian faces (adults and 4-day-old neonates) that were presented just once to a large sample of participants. A computational model of low-level visual processing, based on Gabor filters, was used to explore the relation between spatial-frequency information and sex categorization. The results showed that participants were able to categorize the sex of the faces, but were less accurate with neonate (d' = 0.36, β = -.97) than with adult (d' = 3.02, β = -.93) faces. Moreover, faces were more frequently categorized as boys' than girls' faces. The computational model suggests that specific spatial-frequency channels carry most of the useful information for the categorization task. Overall, the findings reveal that subtle differences in neonate facial structure were enough to allow the sex categorization of neonate faces, although accuracy was low in both adults and the computational model of low-level visual processing.

Frontal bone remodeling for gender reassignment of the male forehead: a gender-reassignment surgery

Gender-reassignment therapy, especially for reshaping of the forehead, can be an effective treatment to improve self-esteem. Contouring of the cranial vault, especially of the forehead, still is a rarely performed surgical procedure for gender reassignment. In addition to surgical bone remodeling, several materials have been used for remodeling and refinement of the frontal bone. But due to shortcomings of autogenous bone material and the disadvantages of polyethylene or methylmethacrylate, hydroxyapatite cement (HAC) composed of tetracalcium phosphate and dicalcium phosphate seems to be an alternative. This study aimed to analyze the clinical outcome after frontal bone remodeling with HAC for gender male-to-female reassignment. The 21 patients in the study were treated for gender reassignment of the male frontal bone using HAC. The average age of these patients was 33.4 years (range, 21–42 years). The average volume of HAC used per patient was 3.83 g. The authors’ clinical series demonstrated a satisfactory result. The surgery was easy to perform, and HAC was easy to apply and shape to suit individual needs. Overall satisfaction was very high. Therefore, HAC is a welcome alternative to the traditional use of autogenous bone graft for correction of cranial vault irregularities.

The neuropsychology of face perception: beyond simple dissociations and functional selectivity

Face processing relies on a distributed, patchy network of cortical regions in the temporal and frontal lobes that respond disproportionately to face stimuli, other cortical regions that are not even primarily visual (such as somatosensory cortex), and subcortical structures such as the amygdala. Higher-level face perception abilities, such as judging identity, emotion and trustworthiness, appear to rely on an intact face-processing network that includes the occipital face area (OFA), whereas lower-level face categorization abilities, such as discriminating faces from objects, can be achieved without OFA, perhaps via the direct connections to the fusiform face area (FFA) from several extrastriate cortical areas. Some lesion, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) findings argue against a strict feed-forward hierarchical model of face perception, in which the OFA is the principal and common source of input for other visual and non-visual cortical regions involved in face perception, including the FFA, face-selective superior temporal sulcus and somatosensory cortex. Instead, these findings point to a more interactive model in which higher-level face perception abilities depend on the interplay between several functionally and anatomically distinct neural regions. Furthermore, the nature of these interactions may depend on the particular demands of the task. We review the lesion and TMS literature on this topic and highlight the dynamic and distributed nature of face processing.

Hand movements reveal the time-course of shape and pigmentation processing in face categorization

Although the roles of shape and pigmentation cues in face categorization have been studied in detail, the time-course of their processing has remained elusive. We measured participants' hand movements via the computer mouse en route to male or female responses (gender task) or young or old responses (age task) on the screen. Participants were presented with male and female faces (gender task) or with young and old faces (age task) that were typical, shape-atypical, or pigmentation-atypical. Before settling into correct categorizations, the processing of atypical cues led hand trajectories to deviate toward the opposite gender or age category. A temporal analysis of these trajectory deviations revealed dissociable dynamics in shape and pigmentation processing. Pigmentation had a privileged, early role during gender categorization, preceding shape effects by approximately 50 ms and preceding pigmentation effects in age categorization by 100 ms. In age categorization, however, pigmentation had a simultaneous onset of influence as shape. It also had a more dominant influence than shape throughout the gender and age categorization process. The results reveal the time-course of shape and pigmentation processing in gender and age categorization.

The colour of gender stereotyping

Despite legislative attempts to eliminate gender stereotyping from society, the propensity to evaluate people on the basis of their sex remains a pernicious social problem. Noting the critical interplay between cultural and cognitive factors in the establishment of stereotypical beliefs, the current investigation explored the extent to which culturally transmitted colour-gender associations (i.e., pink is for girls, blue is for boys) set the stage for the automatic activation and expression of gender stereotypes. Across six experiments, the results demonstrated that (1) consumer choice for children's goods is dominated by gender-stereotyped colours (Experiment 1); (2) colour-based stereotypic associations guide young children's behaviour (Experiment 2); (3) colour-gender associations automatically activate associated stereotypes in adulthood (Experiments 3-5); and (4) colour-based stereotypic associations bias impressions of male and female targets (Experiment 6). These findings indicate that, despite prohibitions against stereotyping, seemingly innocuous societal practices may continue to promote this mode of thought.

At the crossroads of conspicuous and concealable: what race categories communicate about sexual orientation

We found that judgments of a perceptually ambiguous social category, sexual orientation, varied as a function of a perceptually obvious social category, race. Sexual orientation judgments tend to exploit a heuristic of gender inversion that often promotes accuracy. We predicted that an orthogonal social category that is itself gendered, race, would impact both sexual orientation categorizations and their accuracy. Importantly, overlaps in both the phenotypes and stereotypes associated with specific race and sex categories (e.g., the categories Black and Men and the categories Asian and Women) lead race categories to be decidedly gendered. Therefore, we reasoned that race categories would bias judgments of sexual orientation and their accuracy because of the inherent gendered nature. Indeed, both gay and straight perceivers in the United States were more likely to judge targets to be gay when target race was associated with gender-atypical stereotypes or phenotypes (e.g., Asian Men). Perceivers were also most accurate when judging the sexual orientation of the most strongly gender-stereotyped groups (i.e., Asian Women and Black Men), but least accurate when judging the sexual orientation of counter-stereotypical groups (i.e., Asian men and Black Women). Signal detection analyses confirmed that this pattern of accuracy was achieved because of heightened sensitivity to cues in groups who more naturally conform to gendered stereotypes (Asian Women and Black Men). Implications for social perception are discussed.

Event-related repetitive TMS reveals distinct, critical roles for right OFA and bilateral posterior STS in judging the sex and trustworthiness of faces

Judging the sex of faces relies on cues related to facial morphology and spatial relations between features, whereas judging the trustworthiness of faces relies on both structural and expressive cues that signal affective valence. The right occipital face area (OFA) processes structural cues and has been associated with sex judgments, whereas the posterior STS processes changeable facial cues related to muscle movements and is activated when observers judge trustworthiness. It is commonly supposed that the STS receives inputs from the OFA, yet it is unknown whether these regions have functionally dissociable, critical roles in sex and trustworthiness judgments. We addressed this issue using event-related, fMRI-guided repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). Twelve healthy volunteers judged the sex of individually presented faces and, in a separate session, whether those same faces were trustworthy or not. Relative to sham stimulation, RTs were significantly longer for sex judgments when rTMS was delivered over the right OFA but not the right or left STS, and for trustworthiness judgments on male but not female faces when rTMS was delivered over the right STS or left STS but not the right OFA. Nonetheless, an analysis of the RT distributions revealed a possible critical role also for the right OFA in trustworthiness judgments, limited to faces with longer RTs, perhaps reflecting the later, ancillary use of structural cues related to the sex of the face. On the whole, our findings provide evidence that evaluations of the trustworthiness and sex of faces rely on functionally dissociable cortical regions.

Motion can amplify the face-inversion effect

The face-inversion effect (FIE) refers to increased response times or error rates for faces that are presented upside-down relative to those seen in a canonical, upright orientation. Here we report one situation in which this FIE can be amplified when observers are shown dynamic facial expressions, rather than static facial expressions. In two experiments observers were asked to assign gender to a random sequence of un-degraded static or moving faces. Each face was seen both upright and inverted. For static images, this task led to little or no effect of inversion. For moving faces, the cost of inversion was a response time increase of approximately 100 ms relative to upright. Motion thus led to a disadvantage in the context of inversion. The fact that such motion could not be ignored in favour of available form cues suggests that dynamic processing may be mandatory. In two control experiments a difference between static and dynamic inversion was not observed for whole-body stimuli or for human-animal decisions. These latter findings suggest that the processing of upside-down movies is not always more difficult for the visual system than the processing of upside-down static images.

The Influence of Target and Perceiver Race in the Categorisation of Male Sexual Orientation

Although sexual orientation can be judged from faces, in previous work Caucasian or racially unspecified targets and perceivers have been primarily studied. Here, target and perceiver race were considered in the accurate categorisation of male sexual orientation. Asian, Black, and Caucasian participants categorised the sexual orientations of Asian, Black, and Caucasian men. Accuracy was significantly above chance and consistent across all combinations of perceivers and targets. Response bias scores showed that targets were significantly more likely to be categorised as straight, rather than gay, regardless of target or perceiver race. Moreover, judgments of individual targets were significantly correlated for perceivers from all three groups, suggesting cross-race consistency in target legibility. The perception of sexual orientation from faces therefore appears to be robust against variations in target and perceiver race.

Form-specific repetition priming for unfamiliar faces

It has frequently been demonstrated that repeated presentation of a stimulus can result in facilitated processing of the item, an effect termed repetition priming. Questions remain, however, regarding the boundary conditions of this effect, particularly for faces. For example, is repetition priming for unfamiliar faces dependent on the presentation of identical stimuli at study and test? This question was explored in three experiments in which the pose (i.e., frontal vs. (3/4)) and perceptual distance from the original facial identity (i.e., 100%, 75%, 50%, or 25% of original person) were manipulated between the testing phases of a standard repetition-priming paradigm. The results revealed that priming did not persist following any change to a face between study and test, thereby suggesting that repetition priming for unfamiliar faces is form specific. The theoretical implications of this finding are considered.

On the perception of religious group membership from faces

Background

The study of social categorization has largely been confined to examining groups distinguished by perceptually obvious cues. Yet many ecologically important group distinctions are less clear, permitting insights into the general processes involved in person perception. Although religious group membership is thought to be perceptually ambiguous, folk beliefs suggest that Mormons and non-Mormons can be categorized from their appearance. We tested whether Mormons could be distinguished from non-Mormons and investigated the basis for this effect to gain insight to how subtle perceptual cues can support complex social categorizations.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Participants categorized Mormons' and non-Mormons' faces or facial features according to their group membership. Individuals could distinguish between the two groups significantly better than chance guessing from their full faces and faces without hair, with eyes and mouth covered, without outer face shape, and inverted 180°; but not from isolated features (i.e., eyes, nose, or mouth). Perceivers' estimations of their accuracy did not match their actual accuracy. Exploration of the remaining features showed that Mormons and non-Mormons significantly differed in perceived health and that these perceptions were related to perceptions of skin quality, as demonstrated in a structural equation model representing the contributions of skin color and skin texture. Other judgments related to health (facial attractiveness, facial symmetry, and structural aspects related to body weight) did not differ between the two groups. Perceptions of health were also responsible for differences in perceived spirituality, explaining folk hypotheses that Mormons are distinct because they appear more spiritual than non-Mormons.

Conclusions/Significance

Subtle markers of group membership can influence how others are perceived and categorized. Perceptions of health from non-obvious and minimal cues distinguished individuals according to their religious group membership. These data illustrate how the non-conscious detection of very subtle differences in others' appearances supports cognitively complex judgments such as social categorization.

Facial determinants of female gender and feminizing forehead cranioplasty

OBJECTIVE/HYPOTHESIS

Information determined by viewing a face includes familiarity, emotion, attractiveness, and gender. However, the specific facial characteristics that enable one to identify gender are largely unknown. Research suggests that femininity is a critical component of beauty; however, the most important identifiers of a woman's face are unknown. The objectives of this article were: 1) determine the area of the face most significant in identifying female gender, 2) determine if individuals with gender-confirming surgery of the face are identified as male or female, 3) review the efficacy and safety of a series of feminizing forehead cranioplasties.

STUDY DESIGN

1) Prospective evaluation of computer simulated changes and postoperative patient images, 2) retrospective review of medical records.

METHODS

1) Photographs of men were digitally altered to adjust (a) the forehead (b) the nose/lip, (c) the jaw. Each change a, b, or c is done in isolation in both frontal and profile views. Subjects were shown the three profile and the three frontal photographs and asked to rate which of each set is the most feminine. 2) Photographs of male-to-female (MTF) transgender patients who may have had forehead, midface, or jaw surgery were shown to subjects. Subjects were asked the gender of the person in each picture. 3) Medical records and operative reports of 168 patients who underwent feminizing forehead cranioplasty were evaluated for surgical technique, and complications.

RESULTS

For Experiment 1, in frontal views of all subjects the forehead modification was selected as the most feminine, whereas in no cases was the forehead modification selected as least feminine by a majority of respondents. For the profile view, again the forehead modification was selected as most feminine by respondents for the majority of subjects, but surprisingly, the strength of the association between frontal modification and femininity, while strongly statistically significant, was more evident in the frontal view. For Experiment 2, among transgendered faces shown to viewers, 82% of postoperative forehead modifications were judged as women, 87% of postoperative midface modifications were judged as women, and 85% of postoperative lower faces were judged as women. For section 3, the review of safety and technique in 168 feminizing forehead cranioplasties, there were three basic surgical techniques utilized with only three complications for an overall complication rate of 1.8%.

CONCLUSIONS

Feminization of the forehead through cranioplasty is safe and has a significant impact in determining the gender of the patient. The strong association between femininity and attractiveness can now be more specifically attributed to the upper third of the face and the interplay of the glabellar prominence of the forehead, along with the eyebrow shape and position, and hairline shape and position. These results have strong implications for a paradigm shift in the method of facial analysis used to select aesthetic procedures and illuminates the processes by which femininity and attractiveness are interpreted in faces.

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

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.

When Arnold is “The Terminator”, We No Longer See Him as a Man

The current research examined the intersection of social categorization and identity recognition to investigate whether and when one form of construal would dominate people’s responses to social targets. Using an automatic priming paradigm and manipulating prime duration to examine how familiarity with social targets and the time course of processing moderate construal, we asked participants to judge the familiarity and sex of faces (Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). The results revealed that both unfamiliar and familiar faces were initially categorized by sex but that familiar faces were quickly (and automatically) reclassified in terms of identity. Implications for models of face processing and person perception are discussed.

Attentional prioritization of infant faces is limited to own-race infants

Background

Recent evidence indicates that infant faces capture attention automatically, presumably to elicit caregiving behavior from adults and leading to greater probability of progeny survival. Elsewhere, evidence demonstrates that people show deficiencies in the processing of other-race relative to own-race faces. We ask whether this other-race effect impacts on attentional attraction to infant faces. Using a dot-probe task to reveal the spatial allocation of attention, we investigate whether other-race infants capture attention.

Principal Findings

South Asian and White participants (young adults aged 18–23 years) responded to a probe shape appearing in a location previously occupied by either an infant face or an adult face; across trials, the race (South Asian/White) of the faces was manipulated. Results indicated that participants were faster to respond to probes that appeared in the same location as infant faces than adult faces, but only on own-race trials.

Conclusions/Significance

Own-race infant faces attract attention, but other-race infant faces do not. Sensitivity to face-specific care-seeking cues in other-race kindenschema may be constrained by interracial contact and experience.

The biology of facial beauty

It was once widely believed that standards of beauty were arbitrarily variable. Recent research suggests, however, that people's views of facial attractiveness are remarkably consistent, regardless of race, nationality or age. Facial characteristics are known to influence human attractiveness judgements and evolutionary psychologists suggest that these characteristics all pertain to health, leading to the conclusion that humans have evolved to view certain bodily features as attractive because the features were displayed by healthy others. Here we review some of the fundamental principles of sexual selection theory that apply to human beauty and summarize the major findings of human beauty perception.

The face is not an empty canvas: how facial expressions interact with facial appearance

Faces are not simply blank canvases upon which facial expressions write their emotional messages. In fact, facial appearance and facial movement are both important social signalling systems in their own right. We here provide multiple lines of evidence for the notion that the social signals derived from facial appearance on the one hand and facial movement on the other interact in a complex manner, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes contradicting one another. Faces provide information on who a person is. Sex, age, ethnicity, personality and other characteristics that can define a person and the social group the person belongs to can all be derived from the face alone. The present article argues that faces interact with the perception of emotion expressions because this information informs a decoder's expectations regarding an expresser's probable emotional reactions. Facial appearance also interacts more directly with the interpretation of facial movement because some of the features that are used to derive personality or sex information are also features that closely resemble certain emotional expressions, thereby enhancing or diluting the perceived strength of particular expressions.

Monkeys recognize the faces of group mates in photographs

Nonhuman primates possess a highly developed capacity for face recognition, which resembles the human capacity both cognitively and neurologically. Face recognition is typically tested by having subjects compare facial images, whereas there has been virtually no attention to how they connect these images to reality. Can nonhuman primates recognize familiar individuals in photographs? Such facial identification was examined in brown or tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella), a New World primate, by letting subjects categorize facial images of conspecifics as either belonging to the in-group or out-group. After training on an oddity task with four images on a touch screen, subjects correctly identified one in-group member as odd among three out-group members, and vice versa. They generalized this knowledge to both new images of the same individuals and images of juveniles never presented before, thus suggesting facial identification based on real-life experience with the depicted individuals. This ability was unexplained by potential color cues because the same results were obtained with grayscale images. These tests demonstrate that capuchin monkeys, like humans, recognize whom they see in a picture.

Anchoring gaze when categorizing faces' sex: evidence from eye-tracking data

Previous research has shown that during recognition of frontal views of faces, the preferred landing positions of eye fixations are either on the nose or the eye region. Can these findings generalize to other facial views and a simpler perceptual task? An eye-tracking experiment investigated categorization of the sex of faces seen in four views. The results revealed a strategy, preferred in all views, which consisted of focusing gaze within an 'infraorbital region' of the face. This region was fixated more in the first than in subsequent fixations. Males anchored gaze lower and more centrally than females.

Asymmetries of the human social brain in the visual, auditory and chemical modalities

Structural and functional asymmetries are present in many regions of the human brain responsible for motor control, sensory and cognitive functions and communication. Here, we focus on hemispheric asymmetries underlying the domain of social perception, broadly conceived as the analysis of information about other individuals based on acoustic, visual and chemical signals. By means of these cues the brain establishes the border between 'self' and 'other', and interprets the surrounding social world in terms of the physical and behavioural characteristics of conspecifics essential for impression formation and for creating bonds and relationships. We show that, considered from the standpoint of single- and multi-modal sensory analysis, the neural substrates of the perception of voices, faces, gestures, smells and pheromones, as evidenced by modern neuroimaging techniques, are characterized by a general pattern of right-hemispheric functional asymmetry that might benefit from other aspects of hemispheric lateralization rather than constituting a true specialization for social information.

Lateralized Repetition Priming for Unfamiliar Faces

Repetition priming (RP) is the ability to recognize a stimulus more rapidly as a result of prior exposure to the item. Recent research examining the neuroanatomical basis of this effect has demonstrated RP for familiar faces presented to the right but not to the left cerebral hemisphere. Extending this line of enquiry, the current research considered whether similar effects emerge when unfamiliar faces are the stimuli of interest. Using a divided-visual-field methodology, RP for unfamiliar faces in the left and the right hemispheres was assessed. The results revealed that RP: (i) only emerges in the right hemisphere; (ii) is evident regardless of whether the lateralized presentation of unfamiliar faces occurs at study or at test and (iii) occurs only when hair is cropped from the faces. The theoretical implications of these findings are considered.

Perceiving age and gender in unfamiliar faces: brain potential evidence for implicit and explicit person categorization

We used repetition priming to investigate implicit and explicit processes of unfamiliar face categorization. During prime and test phases, participants categorized unfamiliar faces according to either age or gender. Faces presented at test were either new or primed in a task-congruent (same task during priming and test) or incongruent (different tasks) condition. During age categorization, reaction times revealed significant priming for both priming conditions, and event-related potentials yielded an increased N170 over the left hemisphere as a result of priming. During gender categorization, congruent faces elicited priming and a latency decrease in the right N170. Accordingly, information about age is extracted irrespective of processing demands, and priming facilitates the extraction of feature information reflected in the left N170 effect. By contrast, priming of gender categorization may depend on whether the task at initial presentation requires configural processing.

Us and them: memory advantages in perceptually ambiguous groups

Ingroup advantages and outgroup deficits in perception and memory are well-established in research on race, gender, and other ostensibly identifiable social categories. The present study extended this research to a social category that is not as perceptually apparent: male sexual orientation. Consistent with hypotheses, an interaction of participant sexual orientation and image sexual orientation revealed an ingroup enhancement and outgroup deficit for memory of faces that participants perceived-both accurately and inaccurately--as belonging to either their ingroup or outgroup in a subsequent task. Additionally, parallel effects were found for the accurate identification of sexual orientation--a finding consistent with previous literature. The present data highlight the importance of social categorization for subsequent memory and suggest that the underlying cognitive machinery responsible for the recognition of groups may be co-opted for other relevant social applications.

Mechanisms of Identity and Gender Decisions to Faces: Who Rocked in 1986?

Two experiments are reported in which participants made familiarity decisions (Is this face familiar or not?) or gender decisions (Is this face male or female?) to the same sets of faces presented as whole faces or as internal features only. The experimental items on which the analysis was performed were famous and unfamiliar male faces that differed on rated masculinity. The famous faces also differed on age of acquisition (AoA). The experimental male faces were combined with an equal number of famous and unfamiliar female faces for presentation to participants. In experiment 1 we found faster and more accurate familiarity decisions to whole male faces than to internal features; also an interaction between AoA and masculinity such that familiarity decisions were both faster and more accurate to high-than to low-masculinity faces when those faces were late-acquired, but not when they were early-acquired. In experiment 2 we found the same benefit for whole faces over internal features and the same interaction between AoA and masculinity in gender decisions. The similarity between the effects of AoA and masculinity in familiarity and gender decisions is more readily accounted for by models of face processing which posit a close relationship between gender and identity processing than by models which maintain that those aspects of face perception are dealt with by quite separate processing streams. We propose that gender decisions, like familiarity decisions, are semantic judgments (rather than judgments based on the analysis of the surface features of faces), and that the shared basis of the two forms of decision explains why they show similar influences of AoA and masculinity.

The Role of Holistic Processing in Judgments of Facial Attractiveness

Previous work has demonstrated that facial identity recognition, expression recognition, gender categorisation, and race categorisation rely on a holistic representation. Here we examine whether a holistic representation is also used for judgments of facial attractiveness. Like past studies, we used the composite paradigm to assess holistic processing (Young et al 1987, Perception16 747–759). Experiment 1 showed that top halves of upright faces are judged to be more attractive when aligned with an attractive bottom half than when aligned with an unattractive bottom half. To assess whether this effect resulted from holistic processing or more general effects, we examined the impact of the attractive and unattractive bottom halves when upright halves were misaligned and when aligned and misaligned halves were presented upside-down. The bottom halves had no effect in either condition. These results demonstrate that the perceptual processes underlying upright facial-attractiveness judgments represent the face holistically. Our findings with attractiveness judgments and previous demonstrations involving other aspects of face processing suggest that a common holistic representation is used for most types of face processing.

Is medial canthal tilt a powerful cue for facial attractiveness?

PURPOSE

To identify medial canthal tilt as an important cue used by judges in evaluating human female facial attractiveness.

METHODS

An experimental study was conducted with the use of SuperLab Pro, and judges had to make a forced choice between unmodified faces and faces that had their medial canthal tilt accentuated through the use of Adobe Photoshop CS.

RESULTS

Female faces with accentuated medial canthal tilt were preferred 93% of the time over unmodified faces (p < 0.0001).

CONCLUSIONS

Medial canthal tilt appears to be a powerful cue used in judging human female facial attractiveness. Its power may be due to its relation to the neotenic and sexually dimorphic cue of palpebral fissure inclination.

An Objective System for Measuring Facial Attractiveness

BACKGROUND

Research over the past 20 years has shown that judgments of facial attractiveness are universal; people from all cultures and backgrounds rank and rate faces for attractiveness the same. As such a model for objectively rating facial attractiveness is theoretically plausible, if designed, it would have many uses, including outcomes analysis in plastic surgery of the face. The authors tested a schematic facial composite/prototype mathematical model (the phi mask created by Dr. Stephen Marquardt) as a method for measuring facial attractiveness in an objective manner.

METHODS

Thirty-seven male and 35 female faces of 18- to 30-year-old whites of European extraction were rated, as were 31 composite faces of each sex using both Internet and direct survey judges. The faces were tested against the phi mask model analyzing deviations of facial anthropometric points from corresponding phi mask nodal points using equivalent weightings, and weightings arrived at by way of multiple linear regression.

RESULTS

The deviation from the phi mask significantly correlates with attractiveness, explaining from 25 to 75 percent of the variance in attractiveness judgments, depending on the methodology used.

CONCLUSIONS

The phi mask model supports averageness or prototypicality of the face as being the major component of the facial attractiveness gestalt and is a first step in producing an objective system for measuring facial attractiveness.