Social Perception

Face Perception

The face garners considerable attention from others. The face is likely to be the first place observers look when they encounter another person. And the propensity to examine the face is evident early in life. At birth infants show marked preferences to look toward facelike stimuli. Given the overwhelming tendencies for people to look toward the face, perhaps it is unsurprising that extensive research has been devoted to understanding face perception.

What type of information is furnished by the face? Perhaps the single most important thing that face perception serves is identity recognition. Perceiving the particular spatial configuration of facial features enables observers to determine whether a face belongs to one's best friend or their eccentric professor. Other entries in this volume describe in greater detail the cognitive and neural mechanisms that govern face perception (see the list at the end of this entry).

Another class of information that is readily extracted during face perception is emotional state. Emotion categories correspond to distinct patterns of contraction in the facial muscles. Beginning with Paul Ekman's pioneering work, these patterns are now well documented. Much of this work suggests that emotion expressions are not only easily recognized by observers, but that the expression and perception of six basic emotions is universal across cultures. These emotions include sadness, happiness, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise.

A final class of information that is appreciated during face perception is one's social category membership. The internal structure of the face provides reliable cues to social categories such as sex, race, and age, and observers infer social categories from a person's facial cues. The interesting ways in which these factors interact with one another are discussed further in this entry.

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