Facial Profiling

When does facial expression reading bleed over into facial profiling? Dr. Paul Ekman and other experts in the field of facial movement and expression are consistent in their message - you should see a person's neutral face, their baseline expressions, BEFORE you attempt to draw much conclusion from static photos, in particular.

And yet some research seems to point to people being able to predict some personality features by looking at pictures of faces. What's going on here? Is "facial profiling" ever reasonable, ever fair?

Slate Magazine has a great article on the subject:

But today, physiognomy is making a comeback. In the last decade, breakthroughs in 3-D modeling and animation software have opened up the field. At the same time, ideas from genetics and evolutionary psychology are reanimating old debates about biological determinism, race and gender differences, and why humans possess the faces and bodies that we do.

The new research suggests we are more skilled at "reading faces" than we knew. People are surprisingly adept at assessing sexual orientation from headshots. Five-year-olds can predict election outcomes based on photos of the candidates. We can even guess whether a face belongs to a Democrat or a Republican at a rate better than chance, according to a forthcoming study out of Princeton.

The Eyes Have It

Have you ever noticed that human eyes are rather significantly different than the eyes of other mammals, including (or maybe even especially) those of other primates? A new study from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Antropology in Germany has hypothesized that our white sclera and high-contrast irises have helped others understand where our gaze is directed, which in turn improved our social communication and cooperation abilities.

Why Eyes are So Alluring

Can you think of times when you've reacted to just a minor movement of someone's gaze?

The classic is the party scene where, even without the person moving their head, you notice their gaze leave your face and move over your shoulder to someone beyond. This is a subtle, but strong social cue that the conversation is drawing to a close and, unless you want to seem uncouth, you need to move aside in such a way to allow your conversational partner to leave.

Share other gaze-related body language cues in the comments!

Anxiety and Othello's Error

In her workshop, Amy discussed the importance of avoiding "Othello's Error" when interpreting facial expressions, which Paul Ekman described in a 2004 interview:

But the emotion doesn't tell you its source. Otherwise, you'll make "Othello's error." Othello killed Desdemona because he thought that her signs of fear were of a woman caught in a betrayal. She was afraid of being disbelieved. The fear of being disbelieved looked just like the fear of being caught. Fear is fear. You have to find out which it is. That's a little disappointing, because people would like to think, "Oh, if you look afraid, that means you did it." No, it doesn't mean that; it means you're afraid.
Paul Ekman Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

A study published in the August 2006 Journal of Personality indicates that people with anxiety tended to be faster to perceive changes facial expressions than a control group, but that they also tended to jump to conclusions about the source of the emotions more quickly as well, introducing significant errors of perception.

Interestingly, when the anxious individuals were asked to take a longer period to link expressions to possible emotional states, they tended to perform more accurately than the control. Teaching people with anxiety to take this time may be important - in the press release from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, lead author, R. Chris Fraley, states:

“This ‘hair trigger’ style of perceptual sensitivity may be one reason why highly anxious people experience greater conflict in their relationships,” Fraley said. “The irony is that they have the ability to make their judgments more accurately than less-anxious people, but, because they are so quick to make judgments about others’ emotions, they tend to mistakenly infer other people’s emotional states and intentions."

Not-So-Neutral Neutral Faces

The April Edition of the Journal Emotion is full of wonderful "face-based" research. One that particularly caught my eye was how having a neutral face that has some of the features of a facial expression can affect the way you are perceived, rather strikingly:

Structural resemblance to emotional expressions predicts evaluation of emotionally neutral faces. Said, C., et. al.

People make trait inferences based on facial appearance despite little evidence that these inferences accurately reflect personality. The authors tested the hypothesis that these inferences are driven in part by structural resemblance to emotional expressions. The authors first had participants judge emotionally neutral faces on a set of trait dimensions. The authors then submitted the face images to a Bayesian network classifier trained to detect emotional expressions. By using a classifier, the authors can show that neutral faces perceived to possess various personality traits contain objective resemblance to emotional expression. In general, neutral faces that are perceived to have positive valence resemble happiness, faces that are perceived to have negative valence resemble disgust and fear, and faces that are perceived to be threatening resemble anger. These results support the idea that trait inferences are in part the result of an overgeneralization of emotion recognition systems. Under this hypothesis, emotion recognition systems, which typically extract accurate information about a person's emotional state, are engaged during the perception of neutral faces that bear subtle resemblance to emotional expressions. These emotions could then be misattributed as traits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

Those of you who took the workshop may remember a couple of the Ekman Microexpressions Training Tool faces that already had a strong "sad" or one-sided "contempt" neutral expression, and some participants stated that they found those faces confusing. Do you know of people who have identifiable "emotional expressions" in their neutral faces? Has it ever affected the way you interact with them?

What a Nod Says

Do we "thin-slice" body language to quickly gauge someone's socioeconomic status? Some preliminary research indicates what many of us know as common TV tropes -- the eager young striver, the bored, contemptuous socialite -- bears itself out with body language during stranger interactions. Not only do those with lower SES show more engagement behavior and those with higher SES less in this study, third parties were more likely (than chance) to recognize and assign SES correctly after watching these interactions.

A lay media piece can be found at Muzi.com: Body Language Reveals Wealth

They found that students whose parents were from higher socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds engaged in more of what he called "impolite" behaviors, such as grooming, doodling and fidgeting. Lower SES students showed more "I'm interested" gestures, including laughter and raising of the eyebrows.

The full text of the original article is available at the journal Psychological Science, Jan 2009: Signs of Socioeconomic Status: A Thin-Slicing Approach

ABSTRACT—Socioeconomic status (SES) is a primary determinant of health vulnerabilities and social affiliations. To ascertain if SES is signaled in brief patterns of nonverbal behavior, we had participants of varying SES backgrounds engage in a brief interaction with a stranger. Videos of 60-s slices of these interactions were coded for nonverbal cues of disengagement and engagement, and estimates of participants' SES were provided by naive observers who viewed these videos. As predicted by analyses of resource dependence and power, upper-SES participants displayed more disengagement cues (e.g., doodling) and fewer engagement cues (e.g., head nods, laughs) than did lower-SES participants. Results were also consistent with the thin-slicing literature, in that observers' estimates of SES were reliable with each other and accurately predicted targets' family income, maternal education, and subjective SES. Finally, nonverbal displays of disengagement and engagement predicted observers' estimates of SES, which suggests that these cues are systematic signs of SES. These results have implications for understanding the effect of SES on social interactions and patterns of disengagement and engagement in other realms.

While it's worth noting that they couldn't mask from the researchers or the naive third parties other SES "tells" like accents, clothing, accessories, or word choice, the study is still intriguing. When you are people watching, look for non-mirrored nods and laughs, or doodles and self-grooming during conversation - do they tell you something about the status (socioeconomic or other) of the participants? When you meet with your supervisor, who nods more?

Is Facial Motion the Key?

If you took Amy's workshop, you may have eventually found yourself looking for some tell-tale movements as a neutral face picture changed to one with a specific expression. The start of the wrinkles around the nose denoting disgust, or the lengthening of a face showing surprise, as the eyebrows arch and the jaw drops.

The Science Daily article "The Enigmatic Face: Motion Is The Key To Understanding Expressions" cites a study that seems to indicate that it's not so much seeing the finished facial expression that triggers our recognition, but rather our experience of the movement of the face in the direction of that expression - meaning that we may be detecting, and reacting to, these expressions even more quickly than we realize!