Research paper on psychology of faces and the relation between faces and perception and characteristics of people

Research paper on psychology of faces and the relation between faces and perception and characteristics of people

The need to produce an initial research regarding face psychology, the relationship of face and perception and the recognition of people's characteristics. There can be usage of digitized images of human faces as ideally manipulated to test the effects of facial status as well as cues on social perceptions and the desire to form relationships among people. Indeed, immature-looking eyes and mouths signaled submissiveness, whereas small, mature-looking eyes and mouths signaled dominance. Noted that, dominance cues made faces look less warm and submissiveness cues made faces look less powerful, relative to unchanged faces. Although feature manipulations successfully reduced the warmth and power of faces, they did not amplify them. Moreover, changed faces were judged as having less potential than unchanged faces as dates and mates, even when perceptions of masculinity/femininity are need to be controlled. Furthermore, research approach will have to suggest that some human faces, in normal pattern will be optimizing status cues thereby conveying some sort of charismatic mix of warmth and power.

There is the need for this research to analyze how people will perceive faces of unknown individuals that show no actual emotions in order to investigate the attribution of meanings from non-significant but complex sensory experience. The areas that are more activated in research study are those involved in the process of thinking, attributed meanings to perceptions and from the activities such as the theory of mind, there plays an essential avenue for people interaction, forming in face perception. Moreover, research indicated that, the anterior temporal areas less activated indicate a reduced semantic memory for faces that could explain the social withdrawal of possible personality disorder. People have developed sensitivity to features in the human face that convey information for instance on certain emotions and intentions. Thus, to investigate this possibility, research will ask group of people to report the characteristics, emotions, personality traits as well as attitudes they attribute to determine and visualize the corresponding facial process and perceptions deemed related for integrated research approach. There features and proportions are found to assume with trait perception in the manner found within the psychology of faces, emerging analogies of face and perception linking to personality are to be discussed. The research should have implications for both researchers' understanding of modern psychology and the relation to an active mind.

Generally, face perception assumes a process in which the mind and brain understand as well as analyze the face, form within psychological context. The face is an important site for the identification of others and conveys significant social information. Probably because of the importance of its role in social interaction, psychological processes involved in face perception are known to be present from birth, to be complex, and to involve large and widely distributed areas in the brain. It is known that early perceptual experience is crucial to the development of perception and such orienting response undoubtedly encourages the rapid development of face specific skills such as the ability to identify friendly others and relatively complex pre-verbal communication. By two months of age face perception has developed so specific areas of the brain are known to be activated by viewing faces (Nelson, 2001). Theories about the processes involved in adult face perception have largely come from two sources: research on normal human face perception and the study of impairments in face perception that are caused by any disorder or injury as acquired. Furthermore, one of the most widely accepted theories of face perception argues that understanding faces involves several stages (Bruce and Young, 1986) from basic perceptual manipulations on the sensory information to derive details about the person, to being able to recall meaningful details such as their name and any relevant past experiences of the individual.

Thus, particular model will be part of the research as crafted by Bruce and Young (2000), as the proponents argued that face perception might involve several independent sub-processes working in unison. Simple physical aspects of the face are used to work out age, gender, on feature-by-feature basis. This initial information is used to create a structural model of the face, which allows it to be compared to other faces in memory, and across views. This explains why the same person seen from a novel angle can still be recognized. The structurally encoded representation is transferred to notional 'face recognition units' which in conjunction with 'person identity nodes' allow the person to be identified by information from memory. While a great deal of resources seem to be used by the mind and brain to understand the face, opinion is divided as to whether we genuinely develop specific skills for understanding faces, or whether face perception is just part of a general skill for making within category discrimination. Accordingly, faces are nothing more than a particularly difficult class of perceptual object which we have learned to distinguish at the expert level, much as people would learn to distinguish between other similar objects if much of their communication and survival depended on it.

Bruce, V. & Young, A. (1986) Understanding face recognition. The British Journal of Psychology, 77 (3), 305-327

Bruce, V. and Young, A. (2000) In the Eye of the Beholder: The Science of Face Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Nelson, C.A. (2001) The development and neural bases of face recognition. Infant and Child Development, 10 (1-2), 3-18