Abstract
The human face is a significant factor especially when it comes to making a social judgment. Individuals can extract a lot of information from looking at specific facial features. This lab report uses the bubble technique to investigate the human face and its relationship with social judgment. More specifically, it studies how the nose, mouth, and eyes region determine the perception of trustworthiness and dominance. The experiment utilizes pictures displayed on LG screens to reduce interference from aspects such as freckles, hair, and skin. Some of the analytic tools include regression, standard deviation, and mean. The result of the study shows that there is a positive correlation between the eyes and the eyebrows when it comes to trustworthiness.
Introduction
The face of a human being is a significant tool especially when it comes to stimulating their surroundings. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that there is a continuation of studies within this field. When one observes the face of another person, they are able to extract a lot of information concerning the person’s gender, identity, emotional status, race, and age (Young & Burton, 2018). When people rely only on facial information, they can generate an initial impression within a short period of time (Edwards, Edwards, Westerman, & Spence, 2019). Additionally, several pieces of research have demonstrated that individuals deduce social judgment and personality traits based on the facial expressions of others (Bassett, Zurn, & Gold, 2018; Petrie, Czabotar, & Murphy, 2019). Furthermore, one can infer that some levels of social judgments are a result of facial information. Through the study of the human face, one can determine whether an individual is trustworthy or dominant. This lab report uses the bubble technique to evaluate the human face and how it relates to the trustworthy and dominant social construct.
Method
To verify the different facial information and how they influence social judgment, the study utilizes the bubble. This technique enables a demonstration of the significant data for a given task (Young & Burton, 2018). In other words, the method is effective in revealing the association between the information available and the observers’ psychological construct. The experiment applies Gaussian windows on stimuli to show arbitrary subsets of visual data. The importance of this is that it does not interfere with facial features’ physical shape. For this experiment, a total of 60 participants were recruited. Participants were primarily Caucasian people with corrected-to-normal or normal visual acuity.
The experiment included 20 faces generated from an internet gadget such as a computer. This medium was chosen because it provides better management over features such as freckles, hair, and texture, which are non-facial. For participants to view the images, they were positioned in such a way that they were specially aligned to their nose, mouth, and eyes. To generate bubble-like stimuli, the initial process involved band-pass filtering five special frequency bands that did not overlap (Qian et al., 2017). By utilizing the Gaussian apertures, lab technicians randomly and independently sampled band frequencies that had distinct standard deviations. Researchers realized that the bubble sizes increased as the coarseness of the special scale increased. To ensure that every aspect of the experiment was not affected, the apparatus was adjusted accordingly. Finally, the experimental stimuli were produced by summing the randomly selected images and the background. To ensure that there was a clear response from participants, the experiment utilized a 43-inch LG LED monitor with a high rate of refresh.
Procedure
The research procedure included two separate tasks containing 200 trials. Initially, for the first trial, lab technicians asked candidates to create trustworthiness judgments. On the other hand, the remaining participants were asked to produce dominant judgments. For everyone who participated, the order of the experiments was interchanged. For every task, the first 100 trials were contained in the trials that were bubbled. The other 100 remaining participants were contained in a different experiment containing unaltered variables. On a scale ranging from one to nine, participants were asked to judge each based on the level of dominance or trustworthiness. To ensure the outcomes were more accurate, participants were told to use their feelings and that there was no right or wrong answer.
To discover the distinct visual features that determine the facial social judgment, the research employed linear regression on the location of the bubble. The analysis involved assigning Z-scores to the 100 faces that were bubbled and those that were fully visible. For each result, the Z-scores were subtracted from the ratings obtained from the fully visible faces. Therefore, the analysis demonstrated the strength and direction of the bubble-induced bias. Secondly, lab technicians computed the classification images by analyzing the weighted sum of the location of the bubble for every trial. The weight, in this case, was the induced bias of the bubble. The trial further employed the Gaussian technique to smoothen each image. Using the null hypothesis’ standard deviation and the mean, lab technicians transformed the resulting Z-scores. The final process included the application of the pixel test to establish the standard quality of the image presented.
Results
The result showed that using the mouth, the eyes, and the nose in the greatest levels of frequency led to a higher perception of trustworthiness. Additionally, there was no visual data that was negatively related to discerned trustworthiness. Contrarily, the use of eyebrows and eyes while utilizing a special low frequency resulted in higher dominance perception. On the other hand, utilizing the left jaw and the mouth area led to lower dominance perception. Therefore, studying a specific area of the face can alter the social judgment of an individual. In this case, one can deduce the dominance, trustworthiness, and submissiveness of an individual.
Discussion
This lab report seeks to study the visual data associated the facial social judgment at the spatial and feature levels. The study utilizes the bubble technique to show the different facial judgments in terms of how low or high the perception is to demonstrate dominance or trustworthiness. According to the results, the use of the mouth and eye areas was positively associated with judgments of trustworthiness. To be more specific, when the corners of the mouth and the eyes were revealed, the perception of trustworthiness increased (Hasan, Ahsan, Abdullah-Al-Mamun, Newaz, & Lee, 2021). The converse was true when the mouth corners and the eyes were not fully revealed. When it came to perceived trustworthiness, the experiment found that there was no negative correlation between any feature of the face and deduced judgment. Additionally, the movement of the eyebrows was positively correlated with higher or lower dominance perception (Naqvi et al., 2021). On the other hand, when the mouth was shown, there was a negative association with dominance. Therefore, the study of the human face is an essential field that contributes to social judgment. An individual can judge another person using their facial features.
References
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Edwards, A., Edwards, C., Westerman, D., & Spence, P. R. (2019). Initial expectations, interactions, and beyond with social robots. Computers in Human Behavior, 90, 308-314.
Hasan, M. K., Ahsan, M. S., Abdullah-Al-Mamun, Newaz, S. H., & Lee, G. M. (2021). Human face detection techniques: A comprehensive review and future research directions. Electronics, 10(19), 2354.
Naqvi, S., Sleyp, Y., Hoskens, H., Indencleef, K., Spence, J. P., Bruffaerts, R., … Claes, P. (2021). Shared heritability of human face and brain shape. Nature Genetics, 53(6), 830-839.
Petrie, E. J., Czabotar, P. E., & Murphy, J. M. (2019). The structural basis of Necroptotic cell death signaling. Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 44(1), 53-63.
Qian, M. K., Quinn, P. C., Heyman, G. D., Pascalis, O., Fu, G., & Lee, K. (2017). A long‐term effect of perceptual individuation training on reducing implicit racial bias in preschool children. Child Development, 90(3).
Young, A. W., & Burton, A. M. (2018). Are we face experts? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(2), 100-110.
Appendix
| Sample pictures |  |