Personality Impressions Research Articles

3D Face Synthesis Driven by Personality Impression

Synthesizing 3D faces that give certain personality impressions is commonly needed in computer games, animations, and virtual world applications for producing realistic virtual characters. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to synthesize 3D faces based on personality impression for creating virtual characters. Our approach consists of two major steps. In the first step, we train classifiers using deep convolutional neural networks on a dataset of images with personality impression annotations, which are capable of predicting the personality impression of a face. In the second step, given a 3D face and a desired personality impression type as user inputs, our approach optimizes the facial details against the trained classifiers, so as to synthesize a face which gives the desired personality impression. We demonstrate our approach for synthesizing 3D faces giving desired personality impressions on a variety of 3D face models. Perceptual studies show that the perceived personality impressions of the synthesized faces agree with the target personality impressions specified for synthesizing the faces.

Color intensity increases perceived extraversion and openness for zero-acquaintance judgments

Research on how color affects psychological functioning has grown in recent years. The majority of these studies have focused on hue or lightness, while paying little attention to chroma. The present research sought to address this oversight in the literature by investigating the degree to which chroma influences person perception, specifically with regard to the Big Five personality traits. Drawing from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, we predicted that perceiving literal colorfulness (i.e., chroma) would influence perceptions of figurative colorfulness (i.e., extraversion, openness). In Experiment 1, participants (n = 351) rated the Big Five personality traits of a male target wearing a high or low-chroma blue shirt. In Experiment 2, participants (n = 164) rated personality traits of 10 male targets surrounded by high versus low-chroma colored borders (green, blue, and red). In Experiment 3, participants (n = 203) rated personality traits of 18 (male and female) targets wearing high and low-chroma clothing (green, blue, and red). Targets surrounded by (or wearing) high-chroma colors were perceived as more extraverted and open than when surrounded by (or wearing) low-chroma colors. A meta-analytic summary indicates a robust effect. Chroma is a perceptual variable that can influence first impressions of personality.

Impression Formation of Male and Female Millennial Students Wearing Eye Glasses or Hearing Aids

The purpose of this study was to examine impressions of persons wearing hearing aids (HA) and glasses. A survey consisting of impression formation measures was administered to 569 participants. Factor analysis and a series of T-tests were used to examine the effect of wearing glasses and hearing aids on first impressions. T-tests indicated significant differences between the control and glasses style for both the male and female model. Male and female control models (without glasses) were rated more positively. Another series of t-tests between hearing aid styles and the control indicated significant differences for the heavier, more visible hearing aid with the control model being rated higher on every factor except “reliable”. There were almost no significant differences between the control and the light, less visible hearing aid for either the male or the female. Correlations among traits differ as a function of both stimulus person and relevance of trait. Data indicates that different types of hearing aids stimulate varying impressions. The findings have implications for advising potential HA users who are disinclined to wear a device for cosmetic reasons. Findings support other literature on impression formation and the hearing aid effect. However, the findings are encouraging, as hearing aid use has historically been associated with an impression of lower cognitive function, yet participants did not indicate a significant perceptual difference between the hearing aid user and the control, possibly indicating stronger social acceptance.

Forming social impressions from voices in native and foreign languages

We form very rapid personality impressions about speakers on hearing a single word. This implies that the acoustical properties of the voice (e.g., pitch) are very powerful cues when forming social impressions. Here, we aimed to explore how personality impressions for brief social utterances transfer across languages and whether acoustical properties play a similar role in driving personality impressions. Additionally, we examined whether evaluations are similar in the native and a foreign language of the listener. In two experiments we asked Spanish listeners to evaluate personality traits from different instances of the Spanish word “Hola” (Experiment 1) and the English word “Hello” (Experiment 2), native and foreign language respectively. The results revealed that listeners across languages form very similar personality impressions irrespective of whether the voices belong to the native or the foreign language of the listener. A social voice space was summarized by two main personality traits, one emphasizing valence (e.g., trust) and the other strength (e.g., dominance). Conversely, the acoustical properties that listeners pay attention to when judging other’s personality vary across languages. These results provide evidence that social voice perception contains certain elements invariant across cultures/languages, while others are modulated by the cultural/linguistic background of the listener.

Does your messy office make your mind look cluttered? Office appearance and perceivers' judgments about the owner's personality

How perceivers' impressions of a researcher's personality might vary as a function of the messiness of the researcher's office was explored in the current set of experiments. Participants from the US were randomly assigned to sit in a researcher's office (A) that was either clean, neat, organized, and uncluttered or one (office B) that was somewhat messy (experiment 1) or very messy (experiments 2 & 3). They guessed the Big 5 traits of the researcher afterward. In each experiment, participants thought that the office B researcher was less conscientious than the office A researcher. In experiments 2 and 3, participants also thought that the office B researcher was less agreeable and more neurotic than the office A researcher. Discussion centers on how the degree of office messiness might matter in terms of whether perceivers view the office owner as possessing one or more negative personality traits.

Personality impression of deformed faces and smiling effect: in cases of faces with shifted eye position

Personality impression of deformed faces and smiling effect: in cases of faces with shifted eye position

A computer-aided coloring method for virtual agents based on personality impression, color harmony, and designer preference

Endowing virtual agents with desired personality impression is one of the most important considerations when designers create agents. Color appearance of agents has been suggested to be able to convey personality impression but how to design the right color appearance to obtain the desired personality impression is still a challenge to unexperienced designers, since they have little information on how colors evoke personality impression; moreover, the design become more difficult when multiple design goals need to be considered simultaneously. To respond to the challenge, we propose an automated method for creating color appearance of agents using a multi-objective interactive genetic algorithm. The method can automatically generate the desired color appearance that can convey desired personality impression, has harmonious color combinations, and express designers' preference. The experimental results show that our method can lower the barrier for designers and speed up the design process.

Age-related differences in the activation of the mentalizing- and reward-related brain regions during the learning of others' true trustworthiness.

Behavioral studies suggest that older adults may be less adept than younger adults at remembering information contradicting their first impressions about others' trustworthiness. To identify the neural bases associated with such age-related differences, we measured the brain activity of older and younger participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they processed feedback on whether their initial trustworthiness impressions of stimulus persons, whose true trustworthiness had been predetermined, were right or wrong. Of special interest was the activation in mentalizing- (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex) and reward-related brain regions (e.g., striatum), which are known to be involved in impression formation and feedback learning, respectively. The reduction in the striatal responses to impression-contradicting versus impression-confirming feedback was greater in older than in younger participants. The activation of some mentalizing-related regions (medial prefrontal cortex and precuneus) was lower in older than younger participants; however, it was not modulated by impression-feedback congruency. The results suggest that age-related differences in the striatum engagement may underlie older adults' inefficiency in learning impression-incongruent information about others' trustworthiness.

Supplemental Material for Do Accurate Personality Impressions Benefit Early Relationship Development? The Bidirectional Associations Between Accuracy and Liking

Supplemental Material for Do Accurate Personality Impressions Benefit Early Relationship Development? The Bidirectional Associations Between Accuracy and Liking

Investigation of Causal Relationship Between Touch Sensations of Robots and Personality Impressions by Path Analysis

Physical human–robot interaction plays an important role in social robotics, and touch is one of the key factors that influence a human’s impression of robots. However, very few studies have explored different conditions pertaining to such interactions, and therefore, only few systematic results have been reported. As the first step toward addressing this issue, we studied the types of impressions of a robot’s personality that humans may experience when they touch a soft part of the robot. In the study, the left forearm of a child-like android robot named “Affetto” was exposed; the original forearm was made of silicone rubber and can be replaced with any one of three other forearms that provide different sensations of hardness upon touching. Participants were asked to touch the robot’s forearm and answer evaluation questionnaires on 19 touch sensations and 46 personality impressions for each of the four conditions associated with the different forearms. Four impression factors for touch sensations and three for personality impressions were extracted from the evaluation scores by the factor analysis method. The causal relationships between these factors were analyzed by the path analysis method. Several significant causal relationships were found, for example, between preferable touch sensations and likable personality impressions. The study results are expected to help in the design of the personality impressions of robots by facilitating a more systematic design of touch sensations. Furthermore, the results of an analysis of variance suggested that the most preferable touch sensation is possibly related to the robot’s appearance and that designers of social robots should understand the complex touch sensation properties of humans.

Leveraging advertising to a higher dimension: experimental research on the impact of virtual reality on brand personality impressions

As new advertising formats emerge, research regarding their effectiveness is called for. Since the emergence of virtual reality (VR) technology, several brands have started implementing VR advertising in their communication strategies. The research objective of this study is to examine whether mobile VR advertising can positively impact managerially relevant brand outcome variables [brand personality (BP) impressions, brand attitude and purchase intentions] compared to traditional 2D advertising. An experimental between-subjects design comprising 160 respondents reveals a significant difference in impact between 2D and VR advertising on three out of five BP dimensions (namely ‘excitement’, ‘sophistication’ and a marginal effect on ‘ruggedness’). Furthermore, mobile VR advertising evokes significantly more positive consumer attitudes and higher purchase intentions than mobile 2D ads. The findings of this study imply that mobile VR advertising can be effective for brand managers who are in search of bringing their brands to life and who aim to obtain more positive consumer attitudes and higher purchase intentions towards their brands.

Voting for a Male Warrior or Female Peacekeeper? Testing the Evolutionary Contingency Hypothesis in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections.

The present research replicates and extends previous literature on the evolutionary contingency hypothesis of leadership emergence. Using artificially masculinized versus feminized versions of the faces of the candidates for the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, we demonstrated that different contextual cues produced systematic variation in both preferences for and personality impressions of leadership. We describe results of an online study ( N = 298), demonstrating that followers who perceived a match between the contextual prime ( intergroup conflict or cooperation) and a leader candidate's relevant physical cues ( masculinized or feminized versions of their faces) both (a) preferred them as leaders and (b) rated them more positively on personality attributes commonly associated with effective leadership such as trustworthiness, warmth, competence, and charisma.

Cracking the social code of speech prosody using reverse correlation

Human listeners excel at forming high-level social representations about each other, even from the briefest of utterances. In particular, pitch is widely recognized as the auditory dimension that conveys most of the information about a speaker's traits, emotional states, and attitudes. While past research has primarily looked at the influence of mean pitch, almost nothing is known about how intonation patterns, i.e., finely tuned pitch trajectories around the mean, may determine social judgments in speech. Here, we introduce an experimental paradigm that combines state-of-the-art voice transformation algorithms with psychophysical reverse correlation and show that two of the most important dimensions of social judgments, a speaker's perceived dominance and trustworthiness, are driven by robust and distinguishing pitch trajectories in short utterances like the word "Hello," which remained remarkably stable whether male or female listeners judged male or female speakers. These findings reveal a unique communicative adaptation that enables listeners to infer social traits regardless of speakers' physical characteristics, such as sex and mean pitch. By characterizing how any given individual's mental representations may differ from this generic code, the method introduced here opens avenues to explore dysprosody and social-cognitive deficits in disorders like autism spectrum and schizophrenia. In addition, once derived experimentally, these prototypes can be applied to novel utterances, thus providing a principled way to modulate personality impressions in arbitrary speech signals.

Cardiac vagal flexibility and accurate personality impressions: Examining a physiological correlate of the good judge.

Research has long sought to identify which individuals are best at accurately perceiving others' personalities or are good judges, yet consistent predictors of this ability have been difficult to find. In the current studies, we revisit this question by examining a novel physiological correlate of social sensitivity, cardiac vagal flexibility, which reflects dynamic modulation of cardiac vagal control. We examined whether greater cardiac vagal flexibility was associated with forming more accurate personality impressions, defined as viewing targets more in line with their distinctive self-reported profile of traits, in two studies, including a thin-slice video perceptions study (N = 109) and a dyadic interaction study (N = 175). Across studies, we found that individuals higher in vagal flexibility formed significantly more accurate first impressions of others' more observable personality traits (e.g., extraversion, creativity, warmth). These associations held while including a range of relevant covariates, including cardiac vagal tone, sympathetic activation, and gender. In sum, social sensitivity as indexed by cardiac vagal flexibility is linked to forming more accurate impressions of others' observable traits, shedding light on a characteristic that may help to identify the elusive good judge and providing insight into its neurobiological underpinnings.

Political opposites do not attract: The effects of ideological dissimilarity on impression formation

Past research shows that people like others who are similar to themselves, and that political partisans tend to dislike those with opposing viewpoints. Two studies examined how initial person impressions changed after discovering that the target held similar or dissimilar political beliefs. Using potential mates as targets, we found that participants liked targets less, were less romantically interested in targets, and rated targets as less attractive after discovering political dissimilarity with them. Further, they became more uncomfortable with targets after discovering ideological dissimilarity. Theoretical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Student perceptions of marker personality and intelligence: The effect of emoticons in online assignment feedback

Online marking is playing a growing role in universities, affording a new range of communicative opportunities through paralinguistic textual cues (such as emoticons). However, little is known of how the impression of a marker's personality might be formed using this extra-linguistic information provided in assignment feedback. In this study (N = 210 university students), the inclusion of emoticons in feedback on a faux assignment was manipulated between groups. For both groups, the assignment and the marker's feedback were identical, but for one group, three emoticons were embedded in feedback, as well as in the overall comments (in total: 4 × ☺; 2 × :/). Participants then responded to questions about the marker's personality and intelligence. When emoticons were used, the marker was perceived as being significantly more extraverted, agreeable, and open to experience, suggesting that only minimal cues are necessary to manipulate perceptions of an educator's personality online.

Meta-Synthesis Study: Positive Effects on Positive Personality of Teachers in Teaching Profession

This study comprises a meta-synthesis study to perceive the positive impact of teachers’ personality in the teaching and learning process. A total of 16 samples from a total of 304 research samples between year 2012 and 2017 were selected. The data were analyzed using narrative coding. The findings showed that the positive personality of teachers was an important aspect that can affect teachers and students. The meta-synthesis analysis has made it clear that the impression of positive personality can help to improve the level of professionalism of teachers; increase the effectiveness of teaching; contribute to emotional balance of teachers; improve academic achievement of students; improve motivation of student; create a practice of healthy culture for a society. The results of this study clearly showed that the positive personality of the teachers affected the process of teaching and learning. The importance of producing teachers with positive personality is essential in improving the quality and effectiveness of education and the image of teaching.

Influences of Humanlike Appearance of a Robot on Causal Relationships between its Touch Sensation and Personality Impression

Influences of Humanlike Appearance of a Robot on Causal Relationships between its Touch Sensation and Personality Impression

The sound of trustworthiness: Acoustic-based modulation of perceived voice personality

When we hear a new voice we automatically form a "first impression" of the voice owner's personality; a single word is sufficient to yield ratings highly consistent across listeners. Past studies have shown correlations between personality ratings and acoustical parameters of voice, suggesting a potential acoustical basis for voice personality impressions, but its nature and extent remain unclear. Here we used data-driven voice computational modelling to investigate the link between acoustics and perceived trustworthiness in the single word "hello". Two prototypical voice stimuli were generated based on the acoustical features of voices rated low or high in perceived trustworthiness, respectively, as well as a continuum of stimuli inter- and extrapolated between these two prototypes. Five hundred listeners provided trustworthiness ratings on the stimuli via an online interface. We observed an extremely tight relationship between trustworthiness ratings and position along the trustworthiness continuum (r = 0.99). Not only were trustworthiness ratings higher for the high- than the low-prototypes, but the difference could be modulated quasi-linearly by reducing or exaggerating the acoustical difference between the prototypes, resulting in a strong caricaturing effect. The f0 trajectory, or intonation, appeared a parameter of particular relevance: hellos rated high in trustworthiness were characterized by a high starting f0 then a marked decrease at mid-utterance to finish on a strong rise. These results demonstrate a strong acoustical basis for voice personality impressions, opening the door to multiple potential applications.

Social Psychology, Consumer Culture and Neoliberal Political Economy

AbstractConsumer culture and neoliberal political economy are often viewed by social psychologists as topics reserved for anthropologists, economists, political scientists and sociologists. This paper takes an alternative view arguing that social psychology needs to better understand these two intertwined institutions as they can both challenge and provide a number of important insights into social psychological theories of self‐identity and their related concepts. These include personality traits, self‐esteem, social comparisons, self‐enhancement, impression management, self‐regulation and social identity. To illustrate, we examine how elements of consumer culture and neoliberal political economy intersect with social psychological concepts of self‐identity through three main topics: ‘the commodification of self‐identity’, ‘social categories, culture and power relations’ and the ‘governing of self‐regulating consumers’. In conclusion, we recommend a decommodified approach to research with the aim of producing social psychological knowledge that avoids becoming enmeshed with consumer culture and neoliberalism.