Facial Impressions Research Articles

Accuracy of the Conventional Facial Impression Method and Three-Dimensional Auricular Shape Data Obtained Using Extra- and Intraoral Optical Scanners

Background: Facial impression methods have been used to fabricate auricular prostheses; however, deformation due to the weight of the impression material remains. This study aimed to investigate the accuracy of auricular three-dimensional (3D) data obtained using a 3D optical extraoral scanner and an intraoral scanner compared with that of a conventional facial impression method. Methods: Six auricles were digitized using an extraoral scanner with and without a reference board around the auricle and an intraoral scanner. Auricle casts fabricated using auricle impressions were scanned using a laboratory scanner. All obtained data were superimposed, and the 3D deformations of the different methods were evaluated using measurement mapping and root mean square (RMS) values. The length, width, and height of the auricular casts and scanned data were measured and compared with the sizes of the original auricles measured using a caliper. Results: Large displacements of the back and margins of the ears were observed, and the RMS values ranged from 0.5–2.4 mm. Larger widths and smaller heights of the scanned and impression data were observed compared to the anthropometric ear data. Conclusions: The study concluded that the fabrication of auricular prostheses using optical scanning is clinically acceptable. All examined scanning techniques demonstrated discrepancies within acceptable limits when compared to the conventional facial impression method.

Simultaneous Reconstruction of Voluntary and Spontaneous Smiles and Eyelid Closure With Triple Latissimus Dorsi Muscle Flaps.

Using the free latissimus dorsi muscle flap for dynamic reconstruction for established facial paralysis helps reconstruct various facial dysfunctions, depending on nerve and muscle arrangements. The authors divided the latissimus dorsi muscle into 3 flaps, 2 placed in the cheek area to reconstruct a "voluntary and spontaneous smile" and 1 fixed to the fascia implanted in the eyelid to treat lagophthalmos in a 1-stage procedure in a 61-year-old woman who underwent tumor resection for a left facial nerve schwannoma and developed complete facial paralysis. Fascia lata and free latissimus dorsi muscle grafting were performed. Spontaneous smile was reconstructed using the contralateral facial nerve as a motor source. Voluntary smile and eyelid closure were reconstructed using the ipsilateral masseter nerve, dividing the latissimus dorsi muscle flap into 3 muscle bodies. This procedure restored her smile and eyelid closure ability, with a nearly normal overall facial impression, making it a valuable technique for 1-term reconstruction of smiles and eyelid closure.

The observer's lens: The impact of personality traits and gaze on facial impression inferences

The observer's lens: The impact of personality traits and gaze on facial impression inferences

Cross-cultural comparison of the influence of skin-color change on facial impressions.

Skin color is one of the colors we are most frequently exposed to. It contains information, such as ethnic group and health status, and numerous studies have demonstrated the influence of various facial attributes on the formation of impressions. However, no research has specifically explored the repercussions of treating changes in skin color as a singular variable. We cross-culturally examined skin color changes along with the red-yellow axis and how they influence facial impressions across six face shapes from three types of ethnicities. A 7-point scale was used for evaluation, and the observers evaluated the impression of face images according to the following six evaluation items: healthiness, preference, brightness, whiteness, transparency, and skin tone. The observers were divided into the following four groups: Japan, China, Thailand, and the Caucasus. Differences in the evaluation and association of skin color with various traits emerged between cultures. For instance, East Asian cultures associated positive attributes with reddish skin colors, whereas Caucasians often linked positive traits with yellowish skin colors. These cultural disparities emphasize the dynamic interplay between culture and perception in assessing facial impressions.

Predicting Facial Attractiveness from Colour Cues: A New Analytic Framework.

Various facial colour cues were identified as valid predictors of facial attractiveness, yet the conventional univariate approach has simplified the complex nature of attractiveness judgement for real human faces. Predicting attractiveness from colour cues is difficult due to the high number of candidate variables and their inherent correlations. Using datasets from Chinese subjects, this study proposed a novel analytic framework for modelling attractiveness from various colour characteristics. One hundred images of real human faces were used in experiments and an extensive set of 65 colour features were extracted. Two separate attractiveness evaluation sets of data were collected through psychophysical experiments in the UK and China as training and testing datasets, respectively. Eight multivariate regression strategies were compared for their predictive accuracy and simplicity. The proposed methodology achieved a comprehensive assessment of diverse facial colour features and their role in attractiveness judgements of real faces; improved the predictive accuracy (the best-fit model achieved an out-of-sample accuracy of 0.66 on a 7-point scale) and significantly mitigated the issue of model overfitting; and effectively simplified the model and identified the most important colour features. It can serve as a useful and repeatable analytic tool for future research on facial impression modelling using high-dimensional datasets.

Age-group differences in trust-related decision-making and learning

Facial impressions contribute to evaluations of trustworthiness. Older adults are especially vulnerable to trust violations, incurring risks for deception and exploitation. Using the newly developed social Iowa Gambling Task (S-IGT), we examined age-group differences in the impact of facial trustworthiness on decision-making and learning. In the congruent condition (CS-IGT), advantageous decks were paired with trustworthy faces and disadvantageous decks with untrustworthy faces. In the incongruent condition (IS-IGT), this pairing was reversed. Younger (n = 143) and older (n = 129) participants completed either the standard Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), CS-IGT, or IS-IGT. Both age groups preferred trustworthy faces in their initial choices. Older adults performed worse than younger adults across all tasks over time. Further, compared to younger adults, older adults performed worse on the IS-IGT, suggesting that incongruent facial cues interfered with older adults’ performance, which aligns with reduced sensitivity to negative social reputations in aging. Multilevel modeling also indicated that age-group differences were most pronounced across all tasks in the last 40 trials. Together these findings suggest that differences between younger and older adults in experience-dependent decision-making are magnified in social contexts that involve a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” which may reflect age-related difficulties in integrating incongruent information.

Impressions from Faces, Personality Judgment, and Relevant Factors

The phrase "facial impression" describes how someone's first impression of another person's personality, state of mind, attitude, and other traits are dependent on how others express themselves facially. One's facial impression is mostly determined by the visual cues of one's emotions, such as the eyes, grin, and other facial features. Personality judgment is the in-depth assessment of a person's personality using indications from their behavior and social interactions, as well as visual cues from their face and other relevant aspects. Personality evaluation requires more complex cognitive and information processing that carefully considers all other non-facial variables in addition to analyzing face impressions. The relationship between facial impressions and personality evaluations is reciprocal. There is evidence that a person's personality qualities may be inferred from their facial features, however the precision of this association varies depending on the context. Previous research also discovered that face characteristics have an impact on people's social cognition and conduct. Therefore, face characteristics are crucial in creating initial impressions and assessing personality. People routinely assess the emotions and personality traits of others by analyzing their facial expressions, which is an essential part of human social interaction. This review can provide some guidance to prevention and intervention programs that aim to reduce social bias and discrimination.

Facial impressions of dominance: Exploring the construct’s factor structure in young French adults

En percevant les visages, l’humain a tendance à inférer les traits de personnalité de l’observé/e à partir des traits morphologiques de son visage. Ce type de premières impressions s’organise en 2 dimensions majeures : valence et domination. L’objectif de la présente étude était d’explorer la structure du construit de la domination chez les jeunes adultes français. Cinq sessions de brainstorming couplées avec la technique de juges ont permis d’identifier 64 traits inférés de visages et relatifs à la domination/soumission. Les traits ont été intégrés dans un questionnaire comportant une échelle de Likert. Les données de 191 participants ayant évalué la photographie d’un visage aléatoirement sélectionnée ont été soumises à l’analyse par composantes principales et l’analyse factorielle exploratoire. Les différentes solutions d’extraction de composants/facteurs sont comparées et évaluées pour leur viabilité.

Perception of Facial Impressions Using Explicit Features of the Face (xFoFs)

We present a novel approach to perceiving facial impressions by defining the explicit features of the face (xFoFs) based on anthropometric studies. The xFoFs estimate 35 anthropometric features of human faces with normal expressions and frontalized poses. Using these xFoFs, we have developed a method to objectively measure facial impressions, compiling a dataset of approximately 4896 facial images to validate our method. The ranking of xFoFs among the face image dataset guides an objective and quantitative estimation of facial impressions. To further corroborate our study, we conducted two user studies: an examination of the first and strongest impression perception and a validation of the consistency of multiple important impression perceptions. Our work significantly contributes to the field of facial recognition and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) by providing an effective solution for integrating xFoFs with existing facial recognition models.

Shifts in Facial Impression Structures Across Group Boundaries

Facial impressions have long been argued to be driven by two independent dimensions of trustworthiness and dominance. However, in an intergroup context, we reasoned that these dimensions may shift predictably and become more positively related for ingroup members, yet negatively related for outgroup members, due to dominance signaling outgroup threat and/or ingroup prosociality. In two studies, we examined how the two dimensions shift across minimal group boundaries for White targets. In Study 1, core dimensions of trustworthiness and dominance became intertwined with each other differently for ingroup and outgroup targets. In Study 2, stronger stereotypic beliefs that trustworthiness ≈ dominance for ingroup than outgroup mediated the shifts in facial impression dimensions. This work advances our understanding of facial impressions and intergroup bias by showing that the facial impression dimensions are not fixed but may shift across group boundaries and that such shifts occur above and beyond simple ingroup favoritism.

Effects of mild psychological stress on facial impressions.

Appearance plays an important role in maintaining a positive impression in social interactions. Psychological stress is known to have an adverse effect on facial skin, as indicated in previous studies. However, no study has investigated the negative effect of stress on facial impressions. Therefore, we aimed to investigate changes in impressions from facial images before and after mental stress tasks using an online survey. Thirteen Japanese men were recruited to have their facial photographs taken before and after undergoing a psychological stress task. We observed the physiological effects of an increased heart rate and decreased blood flow on the cheek skin. Four average facial images were created for each time point (control: "baseline;" stress: "0H," "1H," and "3H") from their facial photographs. An online survey was conducted with 700 Japanese participants, who compared the "baseline" to other images and selected one of two options in each of the six questionnaire items of impressions. The results showed that the rate of participants who chose "baseline" was significantly lower in the items "looks tired," "looks old," and "looks irritated" and higher in "looks clean-cut" and "looks healthy" compared to other images created from photographs after the stress task ("0H," "1H," and "3H"). These results suggest that psychological stress loading not only causes physiological changes in autonomic nervous activity and skin blood flow but also negatively impacts facial impressions for a few hours following a mild stress load.

3D craniofacial reconstruction framework using elastic surface deformation based on automatic landmark positioning

AbstractComputer‐aided craniofacial reconstruction (CFR) is a process that aims to estimate facial impressions based on skull remains. It mimics the conventional method with a conceptual model‐based framework. The existing problems in CFR are that landmark annotation is expert‐dependent, landmark processing in the 3D domain has volumetric challenges, and a method based on a population's morphological characteristics (templates). A framework with three stages is proposed: Building a craniofacial model, automatic landmark detection, and surface deformation. Machine learning is deployed to draw local surface correlations as landmarks and automatically detects their position. The local surface context is extracted using the Surface Curvature Feature (SCF) as a 3D descriptor. Using a cluster‐based filter, the average distance (to the ground truth) of the top 20 points is 0.0326 units. Cluster‐based filters are better than mass‐radius‐based filters and consistently give better pinpoint accuracy, especially in multi‐cluster cases. Training data consists of 140,000 SCF for ten landmark classes. The third stage, surface deformation, fits the facial template to the cranial based on the corresponding facial‐cranial landmarks. Five experts from the Anthropology department stated that of the reconstruction results, 91.5% could retain the template details and are accepted as the natural shape of the human face.

Accelerating Midfacial Prosthetic Rehabilitation Using Zygomatic Implants and Intraoperative Facial Impression: A Case Report

Accelerating Midfacial Prosthetic Rehabilitation Using Zygomatic Implants and Intraoperative Facial Impression: A Case Report

Facial aesthetic minimally invasive procedure: More than just vanity, a social-psychological approach.

Due to the great importance of the face in social interaction, minimally invasive treatments can-besides their ability to rejuvenate and enhance beauty-also change the way facial impressions of a person are perceived. In recent literature, three main character traits (attractiveness, trustworthiness, and competence) and subdomains essential for facial perception were described. To investigate whether minimally invasive procedures truly influence different character traits when evaluated by independent, objective observers. Photographs of n=34 female faces before and after treatment with injectable fillers and botulinum toxin were rated by 393 individuals without aesthetic background with regards to different character traits on a 7-point Likert scale. Tests for dimensionality were performed, and composite scores of the impressions underlying each of the three dimensions were created and compared using within-subjects t tests. Treatments statistically significantly improved the overarching character trait domains attractiveness, trustworthiness, and competence in posttreatment photographs compared with pretreatment. Posttreatment ratings of the respective subdomains also showed a statistically significant difference compared with pretreatment photographs, with the exception of the subdomain dominance which failed to reach statistical significance. Impressions of facial attractiveness, trustworthiness, and competence can be improved by injectables while the naturalness of the face is left intact. An implication is that the improvement of traits highly relevant to social interaction will accommodate the patient's desires for beautification and rejuvenation.

Effects of similarity and race on average facial impression

Effects of similarity and race on average facial impression

A Lightweight Facial Emotion Recognition System Using Partial Transfer Learning for Visually Impaired People

The inability to perceive visual and other non-verbal cues for individuals with visual impairment can pose a significant challenge for their correct conversational interactions and can be an impediment for various daily life activities. Recent advancements in computational resources, particularly the computer vision capabilities can be utilized to design effective applications for visually impaired people (VIP).Among various assistive technologies, automated facial impression recognition with real-time accurate interpretation can be proven useful to tackle the above problem. Using such approach, facial emotions (e.g., sad, happy) can be robustly recognized and conveyed to the associated individuals. In this paper, a partial transfer learning approach was adopted utilizing a custom trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for facial emotion recognition. A novel model that transfers features from one dataset to another is proposed. This model enables the transfer of features learned from a small number of instances to solve new challenges instances. Using the proposed approach based on a newly trained CNN, a portable lightweight facial expression recognition system with wireless connectivity and high detection accuracy was constructed and targeted specifically for VIP. The proposed recognition model provides a notable improvement over the current state-of-the-art, by providing the highest recognition accuracy of 82.1% on the enhanced Facial Expression Recognition 2013 (FER2013) FER2013 dataset. Moreover, with only 1.49M parameters, the model is operable on edge devices with limited memory and processing power. Overall, three labeled emotions happy, sad, surprise were recognized by the model with high accuracy whereas a relatively lower accuracy rate for anger, disgust, fear was noticed with higher misclassification labels for sad.

Feature Analysis of Impressions around Women’s Eyes and Eyebrows using Neural Network

In recent years, due to the spread of the new coronavirus, it has become common to wear masks in daily life. As a result, makeup around the eyes and eyebrows has become one of the most important aspects of the facial impression one gives to others. The purpose of this study was to clarify the relationship between the proportions of women’s eyes and eyebrows after wearing makeup and their impressions of three items: gender, age, and gorgeousness, using a neural network. First, the proportions were measured from the 2,014 facial images collected, and a neural network was trained using the three impression items of a facial images evaluated by beauty experts as supervised signals. Next, we analyzed the impact of each proportion on the three impression items. Finally, an experiment was conducted with the same experts to verify whether analysis results were adequate. The results revealed how the proportions of the eyes and eyebrows affect the impression one gives to others.

Computerized optical scanning of ears: An in vitro evaluation with an intraoral scanner

Statement of problemMaking conventional facial impressions can be uncomfortable for the patient and complicated for the prosthodontist. Using facial scanners to digitize faces is an alternative approach. However, the initial costs of the equipment have prevented their widespread use in dental practice, and the accuracy of ear scanning is unclear. PurposeThe purpose of this in vitro study was to investigate the accuracy of a widely used intraoral scanner for digitizing an ear model. Material and methodsFor reference, a silicone model of an ear was scanned with an industrial scanner. Then, the model was scanned 5 times with an intraoral scanner. Five conventional impressions of the model were made with a hydrocolloid impression material and poured with dental stone. The stone casts were then digitized with a desktop scanner. The data sets acquired with the 3 approaches were analyzed by using a 3-dimensional (3D) evaluation software program. Trueness and precision values were calculated for each approach. Linear mixed models with random intercepts were fitted to each sample to evaluate the effects of the impression method on mean deviations (α=.05). ResultsMean ±standard deviation trueness and precision values were 0.097 ±0.012 mm and 0.033 ±0.015 mm, respectively, for the digital scan, and 0.092 ±0.022 mm and 0.081 ±0.024 mm for the conventional impression, showing a significantly lower deviation in precision for the digital approach (P<.001). ConclusionsThe feasibility of digitizing an ear efficiently by using the investigated intraoral scanner was demonstrated, and similar trueness and significantly better precision values were achieved than when using conventional impressions. These promising results suggest the need for clinical investigations.

Attempt at Detection of Deception Based on Records of Physiological Reactions Remotely Captured with FaceReader Software. Part 1

Abstract Strong emotions are among others manifested in the expressive movements (facial expression). Facial expressions are natural and universal by nature. They do not depend on ethnicity, culture, social status, age, etc. Nonetheless, humans are sometimes capable of controlling their facial expressions and hiding their emotions. Simulating emotions is a fundamental acting skill. However, controlling facial impressions takes time. The onset of such a control is delayed by anything from 0.25 to even 0.1 second – the period when the authentic facial expression, adequate to the emotion is demonstrated – and therefore remains imperceptible to an external observer. This short-lived facial expression observed in that short meantime is known as microexpression. FaceReader, designed by Dutch company Noldus (established and directed by Professor Lucas Noldus), is a software package for automatic recognition and analysis of facial expression. As its diagnostic value for validity as well as reliability, that is the level of correct indications, remains unknown, we decided to determine it experimentally and have chosen to run an experiment comparing its diagnostic value with that of a traditional polygraph examination.

Understanding trait impressions from faces.

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.