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Which facial features are central in impression formation?
Jaeger,Bastian Jones,Alex L.
Jaeger,Bastian
Jones,Alex L.
Abstract
Which facial characteristics do people rely on when forming personality impressions? Previous research has uncovered an array of facial features that influence people’s impressions. Even though some (classes of) features, such as resemblances to emotional expressions or facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR), play a central role in theories of social perception, their relative importance in impression formation remains unclear. Here, we model faces along a wide range of theoretically important dimensions and use machine learning techniques to test how well 28 features predict impressions of trustworthiness and dominance in a diverse set of 597 faces. In line with overgeneralization theory, emotion resemblances were most predictive of both traits. Other features that have received a lot of attention in the literature, such as fWHR, were relatively uninformative. Our results highlight the importance of modeling faces along a wide range of dimensions to elucidate their relative importance in impression formation.
Description
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Date
2022
Journal Title
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Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
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Journal Issue
Keywords
1ST IMPRESSIONS, CONSEQUENCES, COOPERATION, CUES, EMOTION, FACES, RESEMBLANCE, SOCIAL ATTRIBUTIONS, TO-HEIGHT RATIO, WIDTH, emotional expressions, facial width-to-height ratio, overgeneralization theory, personality impressions, social perception
Citation
Jaeger, B & Jones, A L 2022, 'Which facial features are central in impression formation?', Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 553-561. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506211034979
License
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess