Why does your face look so different from mine?

This blog has spent a great deal of time talking about various methods of facial recognition, as well as its relationship to emotional recognition. An important part of this question rests in the vast diversity of human faces that we come into contact with. We need facial recognition skills, in part, because there are so many faces to choose from! As Psychology Today’s Dr. Nathan Lents explains, this human peculiarity also reveals a wealth of evolutionary information.

When we refer to facial recognition as a human peculiarity, that underscores how unique our multitude of different faces are. We have more unique facial structures than any other mammal, and primates are some of the only animals that have varied faces or emotional expressions. Birds, reptiles, insects, etc., while capable of facial recognition do not form display emotions in a similar fashion.

This demonstrates how closely tied facial recognition and emotional expressions are in humans. According to Dr. Lents, mammals first evolved muscles in the face in order to suckle from mammary glands, but as we began to develop into primates and hominids, these muscles grew to become capable of facial expression as a form of communication.

It was these changing muscles that resulted in such a diversity of human faces. In fact, not only are our faces quite different from each other, they tend to vary more than any other physical features.

Given how deeply ingrained facial features and emotion recognition are in our evolutionary history, it is not entirely surprising that some tendencies seem pretty universal. Not only do human babies across cultures develop incredibly fast facial recognition skills but all humans seem to share a set of universal emotional expressions.

For instance, numerous studies have found that newborn humans gain the ability to recognize faces incredibly quickly, learning to distinguish their mother’s within hours. Shockingly, preliminary research suggests that fetuses begin to favor human faces over neutral stimulus even before birth!

Moreover, we seem to have evolved to display universal basic expressions, such as disgust, fear or anger, based on evolutionary responses to the outside world. This was even postulated by Charles Darwin before subsequent psychological research, including the work of Humintell’s own Dr. David Matsumoto, confirmed the presence of these expressions regardless of culture.

For more information on the links between emotional and facial recognition, check out our past blogs here and here.

Ever been told to “man up” or be a “real man?”

It is pretty common for any man in our society to have their masculinity called into question, and new psychological research has explored this prevalent issue of “precarious manhood.” The idea of being a manly man is a potentially very fragile concept that many men struggle to maintain and often worry that they will lose.

Dr. Nathan Heflick elaborated on this issue in Psychology Today, outlining how men respond to doubts about their masculinity but also how both men and women view psychological disorders or emotions as being more characteristic of masculinity or femininity.

For instance, Dr. Heflick cited a University of Wisconsin, Madison study which had male and female participants rank how likely men and women were to experience certain emotions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, participants saw men as being more likely to experience anger or pride and women more likely to experience emotions like sadness, love, or fear.

Based on this, Heflick predicted that, if men are not expected to feel sadness or anxiety, then this creates significant hesitation in their likelihood to seek professional help for conditions like depression.

He may indeed be correct! A 2016 study by Dr. Kenneth Michniewicz found that men and women consistently ranked specific mental illnesses as being feminine or masculine. Unsurprisingly, these track closely to the previous study that focused on emotions.

Dr. Michniewicz’s participants pointed to anti-social personality disorder or alcoholism as “male” conditions, whereas anxiety or depression were “feminine.” Following up on these results, the study authors also discovered that men suffering from “feminine” mental illnesses were much less likely to seek professional help.

Unfortunately, this has rippling negative effects on the rest of society. Based on a 2011 study by Dr. Joseph Vandello and Dr. Jennifer Bosson, manhood is often viewed as a precarious position that must be earned and maintained, describing it as “hard fought and easily lost.”

Bosson and Vandello found that men who perceive that their masculinity is threatened are likely to act out in “macho” ways. If they perceive their masculinity as precarious, such as by facing issues of depression, there is an increased risk of violent action. Similarly, such men could become more tolerant of harassment towards seemingly feminine men and may engage in risk-taking behaviors such as gambling.

This is not to say that men are somehow at fault. Instead, there is research, such as that by Dr. John Gottman, has found that men are simply raised to think about emotions differently than women. Dr. Gottman explains that girls are often raised to focus on relationship building, while boys are inundating with the need to compete and win.

If men are simply instructed to be more open to emotional connection and to develop emotional intelligence, this could help reverse such a damaging trend.

In the meantime, it might be a good idea to learn more about how to detect signs of aggression in the men, or women, that you might meet.

Emotional and facial recognition may be even more closely linked than we thought.

In past blogs, we have discussed how better understanding facial recognition may help us better understand emotional recognition, and we have also talked about how understanding emotions requires similar processes as those which identify faces.

During that discussion, we explained how recognizing faces is an often instantaneous process that synthesizes not only facial features but also assesses deviations from the norm to determine emotional states.

But we have not discussed how different emotions may make facial recognition harder! A recent study by Dr. Annabelle Redfern from the University of Bristol found that, with unfamiliar faces, different emotional expressions significantly hamper our ability to identify the faces.

Dr. Redfern exposed participants to images of actors in movie stills, monitoring how long it took them to learn how to identify that actor in subsequent images. While this seems straightforward, she also divided the participants into two experimental groups.

The first group was exposed to actors with generally expressionless or “neutral” faces. This first set of images didn’t show a particularly emotive face, while the second group was exposed to pictures showing distinctive emotional expressions.

The researchers found that participants had a harder time learning from the emotional images than from the neutral ones, both in terms of a lower level of accuracy and a slower response time. Similarly, when groups of respondents training to identify neutral faces were asked to apply this knowledge to more expressive faces, they faltered and were significantly less accurate.

As Dr. Redfern concluded, “The differences we found point to the idea that facial expressions and facial identity are not treated separately by our brains; and instead, we may mentally store someone’s expressions along with their faces.”

It is important to note that this was done with unfamiliar faces, as we almost instantaneously can recognize familiar ones. However, this results in important practical implications.

For example, witness testimony in legal proceedings often depends on facial recognition, but this can become difficult if a witness got a glimpse of a face with one expression and now sees that face with a quite similar expression.

Unsurprisingly, other research notes how bad most people are at recognizing emotions, especially when those expressions are ambiguous.

But that’s what Humintell is here for! Check out these pages, here and here, for some more information on how you can better develop your facial and emotional recognition skills.