Individuals with higher suicide risk showed more anger and disgust during rest.

Previous research showed that suicide risk was associated with the anger trait and the facial expression of anger when advising on life dilemmas. We investigated if suicide risk was associated with the facial expression of anger during rest, a state when individuals often reflect upon their lives. Participants took a 1-min rest before being assessed for suicide risk. We measured 147 participants' frontal-view facial expressions during their rest 1475-3694 times using automated facial expression analysis technology. Participants' suicide risk was significantly positively correlated with their anger and disgust during the rest, which may be related to psychological pain and death-related thoughts among individuals with suicide risk. Therefore, rest for clinical patients should not be seen simply as a "rest" for the mind. Rather, for counselors, rest may open a window to look into patients' inner thoughts that may be important to their lives.

Learning of a Classmate's Suicide Ideation Affects Emotions When Advising the Classmate and the Helpfulness of the Advice Provided.

OBJECTIVE: Suicide ideation (SI) is prevalent among college students, and suicide disclosure (SD) is critical for crisis intervention. However, students with SI may worry about stigmatizing responses to their disclosure. To better understand the mechanism of stigmatizing responses to SD, we investigated the effects of a hypothetical classmate's SD on college students' emotions and reasoning when providing advice to a distressed classmate. METHOD: In a randomized controlled experiment, students wrote advice to a hypothetical classmate who recently failed in his pursuit of a romantic relationship with a peer. The experimental/control group also learned he wanted to either commit suicide/quit school. When typing the advice, participants' facial expressions were recorded and analyzed by Facereader7.1. After advising, participants reported their sadness, joy, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust when advising. Finally, trained coders coded the common themes of their advice and rated the wise reasoning involved. Additionally, two experts in suicide prevention rated the helpfulness of their advice for the classmate. RESULTS: The experimental group showed significantly fewer facial expressions of happiness, reported higher sadness and fear, provided less helpful advice, and mentioned "confronting reality" less during advising. The difference in disgust and wise reasoning was nonsignificant. CONCLUSION: Learning of a classmate's SI may increase fear and sadness among recipients and reduce the helpfulness of their advice. Increased psychoeducation for students that focuses on improving emotional regulation (especially facial expressions) during SI may reduce the stigma surrounding SI and prevent perceived burdensomeness among individuals with SI after SD.

Hearing a peer's SI reduced listeners' happiness and increased sadness and fear.Listeners' disgust did not change significantly after learning of a classmate's SI.Learning of a classmate's SI reduced the helpfulness of listeners' advice.

Evidence for a young adult face bias in accuracy and consensus of age estimates.

Adults' face processing may be specialized for the dimensions of young adult faces. For example, young and older adults exhibit increased accuracy in normality judgments and greater agreement in attractiveness ratings for young versus older adult faces. The present study was designed to examine whether there is a similar young adult face bias in facial age estimates. In Experiment 1, we created a face age continuum by morphing an averaged young adult face with an averaged older adult face in 5% increments, for a total of 21 faces ranging from 0 to 100% old. Young and older adults estimated facial age for three stimulus age categories [young (morphs 0-30%), middle-aged (morphs 35-65%), and older adult (morphs 70-100%)]. Both age groups showed the least differentiation in age estimates for young adult faces, despite showing greater consensus across participants in estimates for young faces. In Experiment 2, young and older adults made age estimates for individual young and older adult identities. Both age groups were more accurate and showed greater consensus in age estimates for young faces. Collectively, these results provide evidence for a bias in processing young adult faces beyond that which is often observed in recognition and normality/attractiveness judgment tasks.

Social Categories Alone Are Insufficient to Elicit an In-Group Advantage in Perceptions of Within-Person Variability.

Within-person variability affects identity perception of other-race faces more than own-race faces; when participants sort images into piles representing different identities, they sort photographs of two other-race identities into more piles than two own-race identities. These results have been interpreted in terms of perceptual expertise, such that lack of experience with other-race faces leads to reduced ability to extract identity-relevant information across images. However, an alternative explanation is that sociocognitive factors (e.g., cognitive disregard for out-group faces) lead to differences in the number of perceived identities. Here, we examined whether social factors alone elicit an in-group advantage in perceptions of within-person variability. Caucasian participants sorted 40 photographs of two unfamiliar Caucasian identities (20 photographs/model) into piles based on the number of identities they believed were present. Half of the participants were told that the images were of students attending their university (in-group), whereas half were told that the images were of students attending a rival university (out-group). Participants sorted the photographs into a comparable number of identities for in- and out-group faces. This lack of an in-group advantage suggests that sociocognitive factors alone cannot account for differences in the number of perceived identities across faces from two categories.

Judging Normality and Attractiveness in Faces: Direct Evidence of a More Refined Representation for Own-Race, Young Adult Faces.

Young and older adults are more sensitive to deviations from normality in young than older adult faces, suggesting that the dimensions of face space are optimized for young adult faces. Here, we extend these findings to own-race faces and provide converging evidence using an attractiveness rating task. In Experiment 1, Caucasian and Chinese adults were shown own- and other-race face pairs; one member was undistorted and the other had compressed or expanded features. Participants indicated which member of each pair was more normal (a task that requires referencing a norm) and which was more expanded (a task that simply requires discrimination). Participants showed an own-race advantage in the normality task but not the discrimination task. In Experiment 2, participants rated the facial attractiveness of own- and other-race faces (Experiment 2a) or young and older adult faces (Experiment 2b). Between-rater variability in ratings of individual faces was higher for other-race and older adult faces; reduced consensus in attractiveness judgments reflects a less refined face space. Collectively, these results provide direct evidence that the dimensions of face space are optimized for own-race and young adult faces, which may underlie face race- and age-based deficits in recognition.

Attractiveness judgments and discrimination of mommies and grandmas: perceptual tuning for young adult faces.

Adults are more accurate in detecting deviations from normality in young adult faces than in older adult faces despite exhibiting comparable accuracy in discriminating both face ages. This deficit in judging the normality of older faces may be due to reliance on a face space optimized for the dimensions of young adult faces, perhaps because of early and continuous experience with young adult faces. Here we examined the emergence of this young adult face bias by testing 3- and 7-year-old children on a child-friendly version of the task used to test adults. In an attractiveness judgment task, children viewed young and older adult face pairs; each pair consisted of an unaltered face and a distorted face of the same identity. Children pointed to the prettiest face, which served as a measure of their sensitivity to the dimensions on which faces vary relative to a norm. To examine whether biases in the attractiveness task were specific to deficits in referencing a norm or extended to impaired discrimination, we tested children on a simultaneous match-to-sample task with the same stimuli. Both age groups were more accurate in judging the attractiveness of young faces relative to older faces; however, unlike adults, the young adult face bias extended to the match-to-sample task. These results suggest that by 3 years of age, children's perceptual system is more finely tuned for young adult faces than for older adult faces, which may support past findings of superior recognition for young adult faces.

Category-specific face prototypes are emerging, but not yet mature, in 5-year-old children.

Adults' expertise in face recognition has been attributed to norm-based coding. Moreover, adults possess separable norms for a variety of face categories (e.g., race, sex, age) that appear to enhance recognition by reducing redundancy in the information shared by faces and ensuring that only relevant dimensions are used to encode faces from a given category. Although 5-year-old children process own-race faces using norm-based coding, little is known about the organization and refinement of their face space. The current study investigated whether 5-year-olds rely on category-specific norms and whether experience facilitates the development of dissociable face prototypes. In Experiment 1, we examined whether Chinese 5-year-olds show race-contingent opposing aftereffects and the extent to which aftereffects transfer across face race among Caucasian and Chinese 5-year-olds. Both participant races showed partial transfer of aftereffects across face race; however, there was no evidence for race-contingent opposing aftereffects. To examine whether experience facilitates the development of category-specific prototypes, we investigated whether race-contingent aftereffects are present among Caucasian 5-year-olds with abundant exposure to Chinese faces (Experiment 2) and then tested separate groups of 5-year-olds with two other categories with which they have considerable experience: sex (male/female faces) and age (adult/child faces) (Experiment 3). Across all three categories, 5-year-olds showed no category-contingent opposing aftereffects. These results demonstrate that 5 years of age is a stage characterized by minimal separation in the norms and associated coding dimensions used for faces from different categories and suggest that refinement of the mechanisms that underlie expert face processing occurs throughout childhood.

Aging faces and aging perceivers: young and older adults are less sensitive to deviations from normality in older than in young adult faces.

Past studies examining the other-age effect, the phenomenon in which own-age faces are recognized more accurately than other-age faces, are limited in number and report inconsistent results. Here we examine whether the perceptual system is preferentially tuned to differences among young adult faces. In experiment 1 young (18-25 years) and older adult (63-87 years) participants were shown young and older face pairs in which one member of each pair was undistorted and the other had compressed or expanded features. Participants indicated which member of each pair was more normal and which was more expanded. Both age groups were more accurate when tested with young compared with older faces-but only when judging normality. In experiment 2 we tested a separate group of young adults on the same two tasks but with upright and inverted face pairs to examine the differential pattern of results between the normality and discrimination tasks. Inversion impaired performance on the normality task but not the discrimination task and eliminated the young adult advantage in the normality task. Collectively, these results suggest that the face processing system is optimized for young adult faces and that abundant experience with older faces later in life does not reverse this perceptual tuning.

Detection of Propensity for Aggression based on Facial Structure Irrespective of Face Race.

The human face provides a wealth of information pertaining to the internal state and life-stage history of an individual. Facial width-to-height ratio is a size-independent sexually dimorphic trait, and estimates of aggression made by untrained adults judging own-race faces were positively associated with both facial width-to-height ratio and actual aggressive behavior. Given the significant adaptive value of accurately detecting aggressiveness based on facial appearance, we hypothesized that aggression estimates made by adults and 8-year-olds would be highly correlated with male facial width-to-height ratio even for a face category with which they had minimal experience-other-race faces. For each of the four race and age groups, estimates of aggression were positively correlated with facial width-to-height ratio irrespective of rating own-or other-race faces. Overall, the correlations between facial width-to-height ratio and ratings of aggression were stronger for adults than for children. Sensitivity to facial width-to-height ratio appears to be part of an evolved mechanism designed to detect threats in the external environment. This mechanism is likely broadly tuned and functions independently of experience.

Speech spectrum's correlation with speakers' Eysenck personality traits.

The current study explored the correlation between speakers' Eysenck personality traits and speech spectrum parameters. Forty-six subjects completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. They were instructed to verbally answer the questions shown on a computer screen and their responses were recorded by the computer. Spectrum parameters of /sh/ and /i/ were analyzed by Praat voice software. Formant frequencies of the consonant /sh/ in lying responses were significantly lower than that in truthful responses, whereas no difference existed on the vowel /i/ speech spectrum. The second formant bandwidth of the consonant /sh/ speech spectrum was significantly correlated with the personality traits of Psychoticism, Extraversion, and Neuroticism, and the correlation differed between truthful and lying responses, whereas the first formant frequency of the vowel /i/ speech spectrum was negatively correlated with Neuroticism in both response types. The results suggest that personality characteristics may be conveyed through the human voice, although the extent to which these effects are due to physiological differences in the organs associated with speech or to a general Pygmalion effect is yet unknown.

The influence of shyness on the scanning of own- and other-race faces in adults.

The current study explored the relationship between shyness and face scanning patterns for own- and other-race faces in adults. Participants completed a shyness inventory and a face recognition task in which their eye movements were recorded by a Tobii 1750 eye tracker. We found that: (1) Participants' shyness scores were negatively correlated with the fixation proportion on the eyes, regardless of the race of face they viewed. The shyer the participants were, the less time they spent fixating on the eye region; (2) High shyness participants tended to fixate significantly more than low shyness participants on the regions just below the eyes as if to avoid direct eye contact; (3) When participants were recognizing own-race faces, their shyness scores were positively correlated with the normalized criterion. The shyer they were, the more apt they were to judge the faces as novel, regardless of whether they were target or foil faces. The present results support an avoidance hypothesis of shyness, suggesting that shy individuals tend to avoid directly fixating on others' eyes, regardless of face race.

The development of norm-based coding and race-specific face prototypes: an examination of 5- and 8-year-olds' face space.

The current research investigated the organization of children's face space by examining whether 5- and 8-year-olds show race-contingent aftereffects. Participants read a storybook in which Caucasian and Chinese children's faces were distorted in opposite directions. Before and after adaptation, participants judged the normality/attractiveness of expanded, compressed, and undistorted Caucasian and Chinese faces. The method was validated with adults and then refined to test 8- and 5-year-olds. The 5-year-olds were also tested in a simple aftereffects paradigm. The current research provides the first evidence for simple attractiveness aftereffects in 5-year-olds and for race-contingent aftereffects in both 5- and 8-year-olds. Evidence that adults and 5-year-olds may possess only a weak prototype for Chinese children's faces suggests that Caucasian adults' prototype for Chinese adult faces does not generalize to child faces and that children's face space undergoes a period of increasing differentiation between 5 and 8 years of age.

The importance of social factors is a matter of perception.

Caucasian female faces were randomly assigned to participants' in- or out-group following false feedback on a personality inventory. Participants recognised in-group faces better than out-group faces, but they showed no evidence of category-contingent opposing aftereffects. We conclude that the explanatory power of social-cognitive models will be enhanced when they are integrated with models of perceptual expertise.

Adult-like competence in perceptual encoding of facial configuration by the right hemisphere emerges after 10 years of age.

In the present study, we examined ascription of bizarreness to faces in a ratings task by children aged 8-10 and 11-13 years, and by adults. Configural information was manipulated subtly (a single eye was inverted) or in a more salient manner (eye and mouth were inverted). By utilizing brief presentations we restricted initial processing of the manipulations to one hemisphere. Right-hemispheric sensitivity to the manipulations was seen in higher ratings for (viewer-centered) left-sided manipulations than for right-sided manipulations. The youngest group showed significantly less right-hemisphere sensitivity to the manipulations in upright faces than the adults, but children aged 11-13 years were similar to adults. The three age groups were equivalently able to detect the stronger eye and mouth manipulation. In all, children's performance approached that of adults gradually in this task, which emphasizes immediate perceptual encoding of faces and for which memorial demands are minimal.