Understanding trait impressions from faces

Abstract Impressions from faces are made remarkably quickly and they can underpin behaviour in a wide variety of social contexts. Over the last decade many studies have sought to trace the links between facial cues and social perception and behaviour. One such body of work has shown clear overlap between the fields of face perception and social stereotyping by demonstrating a role for conceptual stereotypes in impression formation from faces. We integrate these results involving conceptual influences on impressions with another substantial body of research in visual cognition which demonstrates that much of the variance in impressions can be predicted from perceptual, data‐driven models using physical cues in face images. We relate this discussion to the phylogenetic, cultural, individual and developmental origins of facial impressions and define priority research questions for the field including investigating non‐WEIRD cultures, tracking the developmental trajectory of impressions and determining the malleability of impression formation.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  British Journal of Psychology

• Publication date

  2022-07-26

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/bjop.12583PMID 35880691PMCID 9796653
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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