Cross-gender perceptions of facial attributes and their relation to attractiveness: do we see them differently than they see us?

Examination of perceptions of human facial attributes revealed that individual attributes are similarly perceived by males and females. However, patterns of attribute interrelationships differ as a function of gender of the face. Undergraduate students (N = 280) rated pictures of 40 male or female Caucasians on 12 physical attributes (e.g., nose size, face width) and overall attractiveness. The four sets of attribute ratings (defined by rater gender and picture gender) were submitted to principal components analyses, and five-factor solutions were found for each condition (accounting for about 76% of the variance). Comparisons of the four component solutions using confirmatory factor procedures revealed that male and female raters share one factor structure when rating photographs of female faces and another factor structure when rating photographs of male faces. Multiple regression analyses revealed that the patterns of attribute interrelationships were not "perceptual units" in the perception of attractiveness, and that different "rules" are used to assess the attractiveness of male and female stimuli faces. The importance of these results for models of facial attractiveness and interfacial similarity judgements are discussed.     

Fat,Four-Eyed,and Female: Stereotypes of Obesity,Glasses, and Gender1

In a between-subjects design, 46 male and 101 female Australian university students rated a target person described as male or female, overweight or average weight, and wearing glasses or not, on twelve 7-point rating scales. As predicted, a negative stereotype of the overweight person and a complex one of the person with glasses were found. However, there was no significant effect of sex of target except on the ratings of masculine and feminine and no interaction of sex of target with either the glasses or obesity variables. Nor did sex of subject influence the ratings. The results suggest that, although stereotypes of obesity and glasses do exist, they may be as severe for men as for women.     

Symmetry, averageness, and feature size in the facial attractiveness of women

Female facial attractiveness was investigated by comparing the ratings made by male judges with the metric characteristics of female faces. Three kinds of facial characteristics were considered: facial symmetry, averageness, and size of individual features. The results suggested that female face attractiveness is greater when the face is symmetrical, is close to the average, and has certain features (e.g., large eyes, prominent cheekbones, thick lips, thin eyebrows, and a small nose and chin). Nevertheless, the detrimental effect of asymmetry appears to result solely from the fact that an asymmetrical face is a face that deviates from the norm. In addition, a factor analysis indicated that averageness best accounts for female attractiveness, but certain specific features can also be enhancing.     

The effects of student gender,race, and achievement on career exploration advice given by canadian preservice teachers

This study investigated the effects of gender, race, and achievement on ratings of appropriateness of occupations and classifications of occupations (people, data, things) suitable for future exploration by ninth-grade students. The subjects (N=125; 106 females, 19 males), advanced undergraduate education students, were each asked to evaluate a case folder in which gender (female, male, not stated), race (Native, non-Native), and achievement (higher average, lower average) were systematically varied. Subjects gave ratings of appropriateness for future exploration of occupations on 5-point Likert-type scales. The occupations rated also represented three classifications (data, people, things), yielding a second dependent variable. Analysis was accomplished using two four-way analyses of variance. The attribute most influencing ratings was achievement. However, the three-way interactions of gender, race, and achievement limit direct interpretation of the data, and suggest that complex combinations of student attributes influence teachers. The limitations of the present study are emphasized; the implications for advising young women and for future research are discussed.     

工作满意度、情感承诺和工作投入对工作技能评价结果的影响

通过对从事人力资源管理工作的公务员、软件工程师、网络编辑和报纸广告销售人员四个职业的272名任职者调查数据的层次回归分析,文章发现控制了职业和人口统计学变量的影响之后,工作满意度、情感承诺和工作投入三个工作态度变量对工作技能的重要性和水平评价有显著影响。进一步对比发现,工作满意度对于技能的重要性和水平评价的影响效应较大。该研究对多个职业的分析结果拓展了人们对工作分析结果影响因素的认识,并对未来工作分析研究和实践有重要的启示作用     

Facial redness,expression, and masculinity influence perceptions of anger and health

Past research has found that skin colouration, particularly facial redness, influences the perceived health and emotional state of target individuals. In the current work, we explore several extensions of this past research. In Experiment 1, we manipulated facial redness incrementally on neutral and angry faces and had participants rate each face for anger and health. Different red effects emerged, as perceived anger increased in a linear manner as facial redness increased. Health ratings instead showed a curvilinear trend, as both extreme paleness and redness were rated as less healthy than moderate levels of red. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings by manipulating the masculinity of both angry and neutral faces that varied in redness. The results found the effect of red on perceived anger and health was moderated by masculine face structure. Collectively, these results show that facial redness has context dependent effects that vary based on facial expression, appearance, and differentially impact ratings of emotional states and health.     

Judgments of genuine, suppressed, and faked facial expressions of pain.

The process of discriminating among genuine, suppressed, and faked expressions of pain was examined. Untrained judges estimated the severity of pain being experienced when viewing videotaped facial expressions of chronic pain patients undergoing a painful diagnostic test or dissimulating reactions. Verbal feedback as to whether pain was experienced also was provided, so as to be either consistent or inconsistent with the facial expression. Judges were able to distinguish genuine pain faces from baseline expressions but, relative to genuine pain faces, attributed more pain to faked faces and less pain to suppressed ones. Advance warning of deception did not improve discrimination but led to a more conservative or nonempathic judging style. Verbal feedback increased or decreased judgments, as appropriate, but facial information consistently was assigned greater weight. An augmenting model of the judgment process that attaches considerable importance to the context in which information is provided was supported.     

Attitude and the perception of faces

To assess the effects of affective orientation on the judgment of facial attriutes, 165 subjects were asked to make judgments of the attributes of each of two faces. For each face, subjects were either given no information about the person in the photo, or were given biographical information connoting either a favorable or unfavorable personality. It was predicted that when subjects make judgments along dimensions that were evaluatively loaded (e.g., smilling vs frowning mouth), manipulated attitude would influence these judgments. For the seven dimensions rated by the subjects, four dimensions showed the predicted effect. The other three dimensions, which did not show the effect, were the only ones that showed a significant effect due to the face itself. It was concluded that for dimensions that are not highly structured by the characteristics of the face, attitude can significantly influence judgments of facial attributes.     

Facial aging, attractiveness, and distinctiveness.

A standard facial caricature algorithm has been applied to a three-dimensional (3-D) representation of human heads, those of Caucasian male and female young adults. Observers viewed unfamiliar faces at four levels of caricature--anticaricature, veridical, moderate caricature, and extreme caricature--and made ratings of attractiveness and distinctiveness (experiment 1) or learned to identify them (experiment 2). There were linear increases in perceived distinctiveness and linear decreases in perceived attractiveness as the degree of facial caricature (Euclidean distance from the average face in 3-D-grounded face space) increased. Observers learned to identify faces presented at either level of positive caricature more efficiently than they did with either uncaricatured or anticaricatured faces. Using the same faces, 3-D representation, and caricature levels, O'Toole, Vetter, Volz, and Salter (1997, Perception 26 719-732) had shown a linear increase in judgments of face age as a function of degree of caricature. Here it is concluded that older-appearing faces are less attractive, but more distinctive and memorable than younger-appearing faces, those closer to the average face.     

Temporal shifts in eye gaze and facial expressions independently contribute to the perceived attractiveness of unfamiliar faces

ABSTRACT

We investigated whether attractiveness ratings of expressive faces would be affected by gaze shifts towards or away from the observer. In all experiments, effects of facial expression were found, with higher attractiveness ratings to positive over negative expressions, irrespective of effects of gaze-shifts. In the first experiment faces with gaze shifts away from the observer were preferred. However, when the dynamics of the gaze shift was disrupted, by adding an intermediate delay, the effect of direction of gaze shift disappeared. By manipulating the relative duration of each gaze direction during a gaze shift we found higher attractiveness ratings to faces with a longer duration of direct gaze, particularly in the initial exposure to a face. Our findings suggest that although the temporal dynamics of eye gaze and facial expressions influence the aesthetic evaluation of faces, these cues appear to act independently rather than in an integrated manner for social perception.     

以貌取人可行吗？——基于面孔的特质推理及准确性

面孔—特质推理（face - traits inference）是知觉者凭借面孔推断他人特质的心理过程。面孔特征、构型以及表情是特质推理的主要线索。其心理机制可从生理、进化和认知取向等方面进行解释。以往研究发现,面孔-特质推理具有适度准确性。其准确性主要受到知觉对象的面孔吸引力,知觉者的身心特征、知识经验和文化背景的影响;情境也是影响准确性的重要因素。未来研究需在面部线索、准确性指标、准确性的影响因素以及理论框架等方面进行探讨。     

Empathy and the Actor's Emotion’

Summary

Consensus ratings for beauty or attractiveness yielded comparatively low, though mostly positive, correlations with intelligence and educational achievement. Most of the correlations between beauty and intelligence and also between beauty and scholarship were in the neighborhood of +.20. Four groups of college students, two groups of girls and two groups of boys, served as S's. The consensus ratings for beauty were secured from 2 groups of judges, each group composed of 12 boys and 12 girls. These consensus ratings were correlated with ratings for intelligence and scholarship, as determined by intelligence test scores and by grades received in at least three semesters of college work. The ratings for beauty showed a high degree of variability. On the average, individual judgments deviated from the consensus ratings by about four steps. Deviations were greater for the middle group than for those taking a high or low position in the consensus ratings. The judges showed higher variability in rating their own sex than when rating the opposite sex.     

The role of spectacles in facial memory: a replication and extension

A total of 187 subjects in three conditions involving 1- or 3-sec. exposure times and 10-min. or 7-day delays were shown 20 photographs of faces, half of which were bespectacled, and then tested from a set of 40 consisting of the original 20 mixed up with 20 new ones, half of which were also bespectacled. Accuracy of recognition declined with shorter exposure and longer delay and was lower for faces with than without spectacles at the shorter delay. In all three conditions, there were more false-alarms for faces with than without glasses. It is concluded that eyeglasses did not serve as an efficient discriminating feature in recognition memory, and it is recommended that positive eyewitness identification of people wearing spectacles be treated with particular caution.     

Public Attitudes Toward the Trustworthiness, Competence, and Altruism of Twenty Selected Occupations

Ratings on 4-point scales of truthfulness, competence, and altruism of 20 selected occupations were obtained from 4 samples of subjects. The subjects included 200 students from the University of Connecticut, 96 students from the University of Maryland, 50 secretaries from a small town in Connecticut, and 50 teachers from the public schools of the same town. In spite of differences in sex, age, occupation, education, and locale, all the samples and subsamples were remarkably similar in their ratings of the 20 occupations. A strong tendency appears for professionals to be rated high and for people who may be regarded as powerful in our society to be rated poorly on all 3 variables. Several interesting differences in ratings on the 3 variables within professions were obtained.     

Effects of mask use and other-race on face perception,emotion recognition,and social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic

We tested the effect of mask use and other-race effect on (a) face recognition, (b) recognition of facial expressions, and (c) social distance. Caucasian subjects were tested in a matching-to-sample paradigm with either masked or unmasked Caucasian and Asian faces. The participants exhibited the best performance in recognizing an unmasked face condition and the poorest to recognize a masked face that they had seen earlier without a mask. Accuracy was poorer for Asian faces than Caucasian faces. The second experiment presented Asian or Caucasian faces having emotional expressions, with and without masks. The participants' emotion recognition performance decreased for masked faces. From the most accurately to least accurately recognized emotions were as follows: happy, neutral, disgusted, fearful. Performance was poorer for Asian stimuli compared to Caucasian. In Experiment 3 the same participants indicated the social distance they would prefer with each pictured person. They preferred a wider distance with unmasked faces compared to masked faces. Distance from farther to closer was as follows: disgusted, fearful, neutral, and happy. They preferred wider social distance for Asian compared to Caucasian faces. Altogether, findings indicated that during the COVID-19 pandemic mask wearing decreased recognition of faces and emotional expressions, negatively impacting communication among people from different ethnicities.     

Facial-expression affective attributes and their configural correlates: components and categories

The present study investigates the perception of facial expressions of emotion, and explores the relation between the configural properties of expressions and their subjective attribution. Stimuli were a male and a female series of morphed facial expressions, interpolated between prototypes of seven emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust, and neutral) from Ekman and Friesen (1976). Topographical properties of the stimuli were quantified using the Facial Expression Measurement (FACEM) scheme. Perceived dissimilarities between the emotional expressions were elicited using a sorting procedure and processed with multidimensional scaling. Four dimensions were retained in the reconstructed facial-expression space, with positive and negative expressions opposed along D1, while the other three dimensions were interpreted as affective attributes distinguishing clusters of expressions categorized as "Surprise-Fear," "Anger," and "Disgust." Significant relationships were found between these affective attributes and objective facial measures of the stimuli. The findings support a componential explanatory scheme for expression processing, wherein each component of a facial stimulus conveys an affective value separable from its context, rather than a categorical-gestalt scheme. The findings further suggest that configural information is closely involved in the decoding of affective attributes of facial expressions. Configural measures are also suggested as a common ground for dimensional as well as categorical perception of emotional faces.     

The Importance of Behavioural and Situational Characteristics for Entrepreneurial Success: An International Rating Study

A judgemental analysis has been executed of the job of entrepreneur in terms of the required behavioural, or ‘human’, attributes and in terms of the relevance of ‘situational’ attributes for entrepreneurial success. Ratings were given by 235 consultants and starting entrepreneurs from five European countries. By means of generalizability analysis it was investigated whether ratings generalized across countries: Nationality barely had an influence on the ratings. Next, it was questioned whether the type of judge, i.e. consultants or starting entrepreneurs, made a difference. No difference was found for the situational attributes. However, the behavioural attributes as a whole were judged to be more important by starters than by consultants. In general, it was not so much the type or nationality of the judge, as individual differences between judges that had an effect on the ratings. Overall, consensus was higher among consultants than among starting entrepreneurs, and higher on the importance of the situational than of the behavioural attributes. The three situational attributes judged as most important were: Number of Clients, Type of Product, and Competition. The three most important behavioural attributes were judged to be Market Orientedness, Perseverance, and Independence (consultants), and Perseverence, Independence, and Financial Control (starters).     

Social anxiety biases the evaluation of facial displays: evidence from single face and multi-facial stimuli

This study examined the contribution of social anxiety to the evaluation of emotional facial stimuli, while controlling for the gender of participants and stimuli. Participants (n=63) completed two tasks: a single face evaluation task in which they had to evaluate angry versus neutral faces and, a facial crowd evaluation task in which they had to evaluate displays with a varying number of neutral and angry faces. In each task, participants had to evaluate the stimuli with respect to (a) the degree of disapproval expressed by the single face/crowd, and (b) the perceived difficulty of interacting with the face/crowd (emotional cost). Consistent with earlier studies, results showed that social anxiety modulated the evaluation of single faces for emotional cost, but not for disapproval ratings. In contrast, the evaluation of facial crowds was modulated by social anxiety on both ratings.     

Have you got the look? Gaze direction affects judgements of facial attractiveness

Much is known about the attractiveness of physical attributes, such as symmetry and averageness. Here we examine the effect of a social cue, eye-gaze direction, on facial attractiveness. Given that direct gaze signals social engagement, we predicted that faces showing direct gaze would be preferred to faces showing averted gaze. Thirty-two males completed two tasks designed to assess preferences for female faces displaying a neutral expression. Participants were more likely to select the face with direct gaze, when choosing the more attractive face from direct- and averted-gaze versions of the same face. This direct-gaze preference was stronger for high-attractive than low-attractive face sets, but was present for both. Attractiveness ratings were also higher for faces with direct than averted gaze. Interestingly, stimulus inversion weakened the preference for inverted faces, which suggests the preference does not simply reflect a bilateral symmetry bias.