The many faces of research on face perception

Abstract

Face perception is fundamental to human social interaction. Many different types of important information are visible in faces and the processes and mechanisms involved in extracting this information are complex and can be highly specialized. The importance of faces has long been recognized by a wide range of scientists. Importantly, the range of perspectives and techniques that this breadth has brought to face perception research has, in recent years, led to many important advances in our understanding of face processing. The articles in this issue on face perception each review a particular arena of interest in face perception, variously focusing on (i) the social aspects of face perception (attraction, recognition and emotion), (ii) the neural mechanisms underlying face perception (using brain scanning, patient data, direct stimulation of the brain, visual adaptation and single-cell recording), and (iii) comparative aspects of face perception (comparing adult human abilities with those of chimpanzees and children). Here, we introduce the central themes of the issue and present an overview of the articles.

Women’s Preferences for Male Facial Features

“…Humans face perception is highly specialized and a focus of much research in diverse areas (Little, Jones, & DeBruine, 2011a). One area of particular interest is whether and how face perception functions in mate choice.…”

Susceptibility to Distraction by Social Cues in Borderline Personality Disorder

“…Interestingly, the BPD patients in the present study appeared to be mostly distracted by facial expressions that had been rated as neutral in the general population, probably due to their greater ambiguity (compared to fearful faces) [6,7,8,45,46]. Studies in healthy participants have shown that subtle facial features such as the position of the jaw, eyes, eyebrows, nose, and mouth, as well as the distance between these features and head tilt can elicit the perception of emotion in seemingly neutral facial expressions [26,46,47]. The BPD patients in the present study might have increased their attentional effort to detect subtle facial features (i.e., to identify emotional expressions) in seemingly neutral faces in order to anticipate potential threat [6,7,8,46,47].…”

“…The human face is a particularly relevant social cue, which does not only communicate the mental state of the sender, but also informs the receiver about the social context (e.g. social threat or social exclusion) [26]. Increased attention to social cues (signaling threat) in individuals with BPD might be related to negative affective states and might interfere with executive functions that play an important role in goal-directed behavior and social interactions [27,28].…”

Dance as a subject for empirical aesthetics.

“…Facial emotional expressions (Little, Jones, & Debruine, 2011;Adolphs, 2002;Bastiaansen, Thioux, & Keysers, 2009) and static body postures (de Gelder, 2009;Pichon, de Gelder, & Grèzes, 2008) have received most attention as sources of emotional information. But it has also been shown that humans are able to recognize emotional expression from movement information, even when it is very limited, such as in point light displays (Pollick, Lestou, Ryu, & Cho, 2002).…”