Putting A Face on Person Perception

Abstract

Nothing could be more obvious than the importance of facial displays in understanding other actors. What is surprising is the extent to which scholars of person perception have traditionally neglected to study the role played by the face in coming to know the states and traits of others. To be sure, much research has examined the role of the face in communicating emotion (e.g., Darwin, 1899; Eibl–Eibesfeldt, 1989; Ekman, 2003), but the face has far more to offer than affective signals alone. Despite the steadfast efforts of a few advocates to bring the study of face perception to the fore (e.g., McArthur & Baron, 1983), it is only relatively recently that social psychologists have put the focus of their attention on the face. From the fountain of new research that has begun to flow into leading journals, we have a rapidly expanding understanding of how perceivers use information available in the face to perform a variety of critically important functions: (1) to identify a person’s social category memberships, (2) to discern others’ personality traits, (3) to detect the direction of their attention, (4) to gauge the sincerity of their verbal behavior, and, in general, (5) to understand the thoughts and minds of others (see Gladwell, 2002). The nature and accuracy of such perceptions is being studied with increasing prevalence and yielding rich new insights. The present special issue offers readers a sampling of some of these exciting new directions. Although reading faces is often regarded as an innate, hardwired skill, one interesting question concerns how malleable processes like the decoding of facial emotion really are. In their article, Hugenberg and Sczesny offer evidence indicating that social context can matter a Social Cognition, Vol. 24, No. 5, 2006, pp. 511-515