Social and Applied Aspects of Perceiving Faces

Thomas R. Alley

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134738854
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This interdisciplinary overview integrates a variety of perspectives on the process and interpretation of faces as a major source of verbal and nonverbal communication. Written by authors from social, experimental, and cognitive psychology as well as from the dental sciences, Social and Applied Aspects of Perceiving Faces covers topics including normal variation in facial appearance and facial anomalies.

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Social and Applied Aspects of Face Perception: An Introduction

Thomas R. Alley

Clemson University

I. The Importance of Face Perception

II. Studying Face Perception: The Problem of Presenting Faces

III. Studying Face Perception: The Ecological Approach

IV. Information and Specification

V. The Perception of Facial Growth and Aging

The Importance of Face Perception

How we are seen by ourselves and by others is tremendously important. Many aspects of physical appearance are potent, and often dominant, determinants of how we see, think, and feel about others. Of these numerous aspects of human physical appearance, facial appearance is probably the most important. The face is widely recognized as the most important area of our bodies in influencing and regulating our interactions with others (see Liggett, 1974; Macgregor, 1974), and with good reason. The face can reflect attitudes and intentions; it is the source of verbal communication and the chief bodily area associated with the expression of emotions and individual identity; and it plays an important, perhaps the most important, role in aesthetic judgments. The head and face also provide information about age and gender which, in turn, are major influences on social interaction. People readily make judgments about attractiveness and personality traits on the basis of even quite limited exposure to a face (or representation of a face). In short, the perception of others’ faces is the chief component of social perception and usually exerts a major influence on social interactions. Of course, our facial appearance also influences how we think and feel about ourselves. Consequently facial appearance may affect an individual’s behavior virtually any time others are present.

The social importance of facial appearance has made the elaboration or alteration of faces a common activity among humans. Nevertheless, the psychosocial impact of most techniques of changing facial appearance remains largely unexplored by science. This is quite unfortunate, for those who professionally alter facial appearance, particularly plastic surgeons and makeup artists, apparently have much to teach us about the important factors underlying many effects. One need only look at their results. For instance, in the outstanding book on facial makeup for the theater, Buchman (1971) created impressive alterations of age, facial size, and width as well as presenting principles underlying these and other types of change. Many of these principles, such as “the face can be made to appear larger by making some of the features appear smaller” (p. 69), should be subjected to empirical study.

Philosophers, medical practitioners, and others have studied and written about faces for centuries (see Liggett, 1974). Likewise, research on faces has been undertaken throughout the relatively short history of the behavioral sciences, but it is only recently that face perception has begun to emerge as a focus of attention and research activity (cf. Asendorpf, 1982; Goldstein, 1983). The great importance of facial appearance underlies much of this interest and activity. Yet, if faces were somehow considerably less important, we would continue to be fascinated by them. Our biological heritage apparently insures that human faces will be particularly good at attracting and holding our attention beginning at least by early infancy (Maurer, 1985). Furthermore, the uniqueness, prominence, and complexity of human faces make them endlessly fascinating.

Studying Face Perception: The Problem of Presenting Faces

Unfortunately, the very complexity of facial appearance that helps make faces so fascinating also makes it difficult to scientifically study face perception. In exploring the social and perceptual implications of variations in facial appearance, careful attention should be paid to the complex structural and dynamic characteristics of living faces. The psychological and social significance of specific facial features cannot be fully disclosed by studies of these features in isolation. (The term feature is used here and throughout this volume to refer to the eyes, nose, mouth, etc., as in common parlance, and not in any of the somewhat elusive ways it is often used in cognitive psychology.) Furthermore, variables such as the environmental context, co-occurring gestures and other behaviors certainly modify the effects of facial appearance.

On the other hand, present-day experimental methods require us to drastically reduce this multitude of variables in order to determine with any certainty the effects of specific facial characteristics. For this reason, among others, photographs and drawings have been used in most of the research on face perception. The relative ease and low cost of creating (or finding) photographic and schematic depictions of faces also encourage us to use such “stimuli”.

Students of face perception must keep in mind that results obtained with these two-dimensional, static, and often monochromatic representations may not adequately generalize to real and, therefore, dynamic and three-dimensional faces seen in natural contexts. To begin, a distinction can be made between view-specific and face-specific information (Klatzky & Forest, 1984) or, similarly, between “pictorial details” and “structural features” (Bruce, 1982). View-specific (or “pictorial”) information consists of the concrete information specific to the particular depiction that was viewed, such as the lighting. Face-specific components include abstract features that are invariant across changes in expression and orientation. These invariants are likely to be the prime support for the recognition of faces in natural contexts, whereas view-specific information may play a large role in standard laboratory tests of memory for facial photographs (cf. Bruce, 1982). This contrast, in turn, may invalidate the practice of generalizing from laboratory studies of face perception or recognition to more natural settings. In other words, the greater importance of view-specific information in many laboratory studies may lead to results that supply a distorted view of the processes involved in face perception under less artificial conditions. A case demonstrating this problem concerns age differences found in recognizing single photographs of faces (e.g., A.D. Smith & Winograd, 1978); these are eliminated when the to-be-remembered faces are presented in multiple views (Bartlett & Leslie, 1986). On the other hand, it seems clear that perception of a single picture of a face can be sufficient to allow the pick-up of information that remains invariant over changes in expression and orientation (e.g., Bruce, 1982; Patterson & Baddeley, 1977). Tasks that require viewers to assess global or configural properties of faces, such as rating facial attractiveness, may produce more reliance on face-specific information than do tasks like face recognition for which view-specific information can provide good support (Bruce, 1982).

The single views selected by psychologists for their research are most often frontal perspectives, whereas orthodontists and other dental–medical practitioners rely predominantly on lateral (anteroposterior) perspectives. The primary factors underlying this difference are, probably, (a) the psychologists’ recognition of the importance of frontal views of faces in face-to-face interactions and in detecting facial expression, and (b) the clinicians’ greater ability to alter anteroposterior facial relationships. Even though well-motivated, such differences in the facial perspective selected to support different research programs may produce what appear to be inconsistent results and incompatible conclusions. Police records and anthropometric studies require both frontal and lateral views because important characteristics often show up in one view but not in the other.

Photographs may be particularly poor instruments when used to study variables that inherently involve change, such as facial expression. A major problem with using a single static depiction of a face when studying facial events such as the expression of emotion is the fact that a static image can capture only one moment in the sequence of activities that constitute the complete facial event. Moreover, a photograph may not even capture the most significant or representative aspect of facial appearance under study. Nonetheless, research using photographs can reveal a great deal, even about things like facial expressions (e.g., Ekman & Friesen, 1975).

Photographs and drawings may also fail to capture all of the subtleties of facial appearance that are perceived in real faces. This problem is quite evident in the heavy use of poor and/or small photographs, often monochromatic, by psychologists as is usually the case when photographs are gathered from school yearbooks. A further concern is that the process of photography is not particularly conducive to naturalness. For instance, a posed facial expression may be quite atypical, as when a morose person puts on a “happy face.”

Despite the heavy reliance on photographs and drawings it would be unfair and untrue to claim that we know little about perceiving faces but lots about perceiving pictures and drawings of them. Still, holes or distortions in the body of knowledge about face perception do surface from time to time when reactions to photographs or drawings fail to duplicate reactions to similar, but real faces. Let the reader beware.

The increasingly popular technique of presenting faces on videotape generally provides a more natural (i.e., ecologically valid) research technique than does showing photos or drawings of faces, but with videotapes of actual faces it is often difficult to identify the important variables that can produce the effects being investigated. The contrast between ‘simple’ schematic drawings and more complex videotapes highlights a common problem in perceptual research: In studying the perception of faces we must make a trade-off between ecological validity and stimulus control. That is, we must choose between presenting faces with all the richness and complexity required to reproduce natural conditions, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, representing faces with sufficient simplicity so that correlations and causal relations can be clarified. The mutual incompatibility of these goals means that some research on face perception should sacrifice control and clarity for naturalness and ecological validity while other research should forego naturalness to obtain the stimulus control necessary to make causal attributions. Fortunately, research on many issues involving face perception has included studies emphasizing both of these goals.

Studying Face Perception: The Ecological Approach

All of the contributions to this book, to some degree, take an ecological perspective on face perception. Most importantly, this means that we are primarily interested in face perception as a process that affects the interrelations between humans and their natural environments, including social environments. Carefully controlled laboratory studies of representations of faces are typical of the work conducted and cited by most of the authors, but we remain highly sensitive to the dangers of generalizing from such studies to natural situations. Moreover, these experimental studies are performed primarily to address some problem or issue of real significance in natural settings.

In accord with an ecological viewpoint, many of the authors treat the adaptive significance of face perception and its effects as one of the central issues to be addressed. Thus, we often wonder why we see faces as we do, and why various facial characteristics produce the responses they do. We are not satisfied with simply compiling a list of perceptual phenomena. Hence, many reasons for variation in the affective responses to faces are mentioned in this book, but the explanations seen as most basic and generally receiving the greatest attention are those that trace affective responses to selective advantages during human evolution.

Another characteristic of an ecological approach to perception is apparent in the tendency to consider what information is available in faces before tackling the question of how we deal with or “process” this information. From this ecological perspective, the significance of perceiving faces that are, for example, upside down or portrayed in negative reversal film extends only so far as these phenomena bear on naturally occurring processes with some adaptive significance.

Information and Specification

From an ecological perspective facial appearance, even when portrayed by two-dimensional drawings or photographs, should influence psychosocial responses of others, for many physical attributes are specific to, or correlated with, certain behavioral tendencies or social affordances. Thus, the physical attributes that permit us to recognize the infancy of a young child specify certain limitations of this individual’s behavioral competence. Likewise, it is logically possible and intuitively plausible that head size and mental capacity are slightly correlated such that perceived head size could provide a clue for mental capacity (see Chap. 8). In these two examples we see that physical attributes can provide information about others that can be either definite or probabilistic; that is, such information will have varying degrees of reliability. We should distinguish specification and the less reliable probabilistic information by restricting the use of “clues” or “cues” to probabilistic information, although nonecological perceptual psychologists (e.g., Rock, 1984) seldom make this distinction.

This distinction between specification and probabilistic information is not a simple dichotomy. Instead, the information that can be gleaned from facial appearance, like perceptual information in general, falls on a continuum from information that invariably specifies certain structural or functional characteristics to information that signifies certain structural or functional characteristics in a probabilistic manner ranging from near-specificity (high reliability) to so unreliable that the information is of no practical significance, and on to misinformation based on uncorrelated or inversely correlated links between facial characteristics and ascribed attributes. This range of informational specificity must be kept in mind to properly understand the psychosocial effects of facial appearance. The undeniably probabilistic information underlying many aspects of social perception contrasts with the typically highly specific information underlying the perception of basic properties of the physical environment like surface layout (see J.J. Gibson, 1979) as well as the perception of relative age in human faces (see Chap. 2). At the same time, only probabilistic information exists in faces for the perception of absolute age. Thus, “judgment” of relative age may occur through automatic purely perceptual processes, whereas judgment of absolute age (and other characteristics not specified in facial appearance) is more likely to stem from conscious, effortful and inferential processes (cf. Kassin & Baron, 1986). A perceptual system designed to function in a world of probabilistic events and information must sometimes operate as an “intuitive statistician” (Brunswik, 1956).

The Perception of Facial Growth and Aging

I turn finally to some introductory remarks directed at the four chapters that compose Part I of this book. All four of these chapters focus on age-related changes in facial appearance; a topic of much significance. The head and face are important sources of information about growth and aging. The perception of age, in turn, is an important determinant of social interactions. Hence, age-related changes in facial appearance are, to some extent, specific to, or correlated with, certain behavioral tendencies or social affordances. Thus, the physical attributes that permit us to recognize the infancy of a young child specify certain limitations of this individual’s knowledge and behavioral competence. Even young children realize that facial appearance changes as we grow and age, but these changes provide numerous puzzles for perceptual and social psychologists.

In the opening chapter, Bob Shaw and two of his former students provide a review of their important research program on the perception of craniofacial growth and aging. Prior to this review, the authors elucidate the influence of J.J. Gibson’s work on their research program in particular, and on assumptions and theories in perceptual psychology in general. Most important here is the recognition of natural constraints on perception provided in natural environments. Tribute is also paid to the naturalist D’Arcy Thompson for his insights in On Growth and Form (1917/1942), a book thought to be among the finest in the annals of science (Gould, 1971). Thompson’s classic book highlights the importance of considering scale of analysis and physical constraints for understanding morphogenesis. Proceeding from their discussion of the contributions of Thompson and Gibson to their own research, Mark, Shaw, and Pittenger are able to take what might be seen as a number of interesting but strange studies and show how they can be interwoven to form a remarkably coherent account of face perception. Moreover, as these authors take pains to show, important insights into social, applied, and theoretical aspects of face perception may be found in this research program.

The remaining three chapters all concern psychosocial aspects of growth and aging. Chapter 3 examines the aesthetic aspects of age-related changes in facial appearance, such as the effects of growth on facial cuteness and the impact of aging on facial attractiveness. The research reviewed in this chapter reveals that the simple notion that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Foreword
• 1. Social and Applied Aspects of Face Perception: An Introduction
• Part I: Perception of Growing Faces
• Part II: Psychosocial Aspects of Normal Variation in Facial Appearance
• Part III: Perceiving Abnormal Faces
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index