Do facial first impressions reflect a shared social reality?

Influential facial impression models have repeatedly shown that trustworthiness, youthful–attractiveness, and dominance dimensions subserve a wide variety of first impressions formed from strangers’ faces, suggestive of a shared social reality. However, these models are built from impressions aggregated across observers. Critically, recent work has now shown substantial inter-observer differences in facial impressions, raising the important question of whether these dimensional models based on aggregated group data are meaningful at the individual observer level. We addressed this question with a novel case series approach, using factor analyses of ratings of twelve different traits to build individual models of facial impressions for different observers. Strikingly, three dimensions of trustworthiness, youthful/attractiveness, and competence/dominance appeared across the majority of these individual observer models, demonstrating that the dimensional approach is indeed meaningful at the individual level. Nonetheless, we also found differences in the stability of the competence/dominance dimension across observers. Taken together, results suggest that individual differences in impressions arise in the context of a largely common structure that supports a shared social reality.     

The harm-benefit tradeoff in "bad deal" trials

This paper examines the nature of the harm-benefit tradeoff in early clinical research for interventions that involve remote possibility of direct benefit and likelihood of direct harms to research participants with fatal prognoses, by drawing on the example of gene transfer trials for glioblastoma multiforme. We argue that the appeal made by the component approach to clinical equipoise fails to account fully for the nature of the harm-benefit tradeoff-individual harm for social benefit-that would be required to justify such research. An analysis of what we label "collateral affective benefits," such as the experience of hope or exercise of altruism, shows that the existence of these motivations reinforces rather than mitigates the necessity of justification by reference to social benefit. Evaluations of social benefit must be taken seriously in the research ethics review process to avoid the exploitation of research participants' motivations of hope or altruism and to avoid the possibility of inadvertent exploitation of high-risk research participants and the harms that would associate with such exploitation.     

“Just another pretty face”: A multidimensional scaling approach to face attractiveness and variability

Findings on both attractiveness and memory for faces suggest that people should perceive more similarity among attractive than among unattractive faces. A multidimensional scaling approach was used to test this hypothesis in two studies. In Study 1, we derived a psychological face space from similarity ratings of attractive and unattractive Caucasian female faces. In Study 2, we derived a face space for attractive and unattractive male faces of Caucasians and non-Caucasians. Both studies confirm that attractive faces are indeed more tightly clustered than unattractive faces in people’s psychological face spaces. These studies provide direct and original support for theoretical assumptions previously made in the face space and face memory literatures.     

Familiar other-race faces show normal holistic processing and are robust to perceptual stress

Other-race individuals are remembered more poorly and receive less holistic/configural processing than same-race individuals, at least when faces are novel. Here, we examine the amelioration of these effects with familiarity, using distinctiveness-matched Caucasian and Asian stimulus sets. We confirmed a cross-race deficit for upright faces following a single encoding trial, which disappeared rapidly with practice on a small set of other-race 'friends' and did not re-emerge when perceptual processing was put under stress (presentation in the periphery). We also examined holistic/configural processing for familiarised faces using the peripheral inversion effect (McKone, 2004 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 30 181 - 197). A test for faces and nonface objects (dogs) confirmed the validity of this technique as providing a direct measure of holistic processing; we then showed that, after 1 h of training, holistic processing was as strong for other-race as same-race faces. We conclude that practice with other-race individuals can rapidly engage normal face-processing mechanisms.     

Book reviews

Spoehr, K. T., and Lehmkuhle, S. W. Visual Information Processing. San Francisco: Freeman. 1982. Pp. 298. ISBN 0-7167-1373-X. Hardback £16.90; paperback £9.80.

Weale, R. A. Focus on Vision. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 1982. Pp. 194. ISBN 0-340-24839-4. £5.75.

Warren, R. M. Auditory Perception: A New Synthesis. New York: Pergamon Press. 1982. Pp. 239. ISBN 0-08-025957-X. £12.50.

Bryden, M. P. Loterality: Functional Asymmetry in the Intact Brain. London: Academic Press. 1982. Pp. 319. ISBN 0-12-138180-3. £19.60.

Simon, T. W. and Scholes, R. J. (Eds.) Language, Mind, and Brain. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1982. Pp. xvi + 263. ISBN 0-89859-153-8. £19.95.

Wilding, J. M. Perception: From Sense to Object. London: Hutchinson. 1982. Pp. 314. ISBN 0-09-150720-1. £12.95.

Rosenzweig, M.R. and Porter, L. W.(Eds.). Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 34. Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews Inc. 1983. Pp. 617. ISBN 0-8243-0234-6. $30.00.

Schank, R. C. Dynamic Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1983. Pp. 233. ISBN 0-521-24856-2. Hardback £18.50; paperback £6.95.

Hinton, G. E. and Anderson, J. A. (Eds.). Parallel Models of Associative Memory. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1981. Pp. 295. ISBN 0-89859-105-0. £17.50.     

Justice for Irregular Migrants,Refugees and Temporary Workers: Some Issues for Carens

The Ethics of Immigration is a wonderfully comprehensive and insightful journey through all the major contemporary ethical issues concerning immigration. Through this outstandingly well‐crafted work, Carens builds a compelling case for many important positions on how we should treat migrants. Nevertheless, I believe there are some tensions in his arguments that could do with more analysis. I present some of these issues in this article. These include some important problems with arguments for the right to education for children of irregular migrants and those concerning admission, his general position on refugees, and his views about what is required in order to treat temporary workers fairly.     

Hybrid Identities and Just Being Yourself

Abstract

This paper points out a tension between Agustín Rayo’s criteria for singulartermhood and his explicit views on the status of Hybrid Identities, that is, identity statements that use singular terms from two different Systems of Representation, such as ‘7=Julius Caesar’ or more suggestively ‘I am b’ where ‘b’ is a singular term referring to my brain. It argues that non-trivial Hybrid Identities are common and important in philosophy and elsewhere, and it suggests a friendly alternative that involves treating Hybrid Identities on the model of Rayo’s ‘Just Is’ statements. The last section of the paper points out that even this friendly alternative has counterintuitive consequences when combined with the metaphysical conventionalism that Rayo finds attractive, when it comes to questions of personal identity over time.