Ganel Tzvi
Department of Psychology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2015 Dec;22(6):1671-7. doi: 10.3758/s13423-015-0822-7.
People smile in social interactions to convey different types of nonverbal communication. However, smiling can potentially change the way a person is perceived along different facial dimensions, including perceived age. It is commonly assumed that smiling faces are perceived as younger than faces carrying a neutral expression. In the series of experiments reported here, I describe an unintuitive and robust effect in the opposite direction. Across different experimental conditions and stimulus sets, smiling faces were consistently perceived as older compared to neutral face photos of the same persons. I suggest that this effect is due to observer failure to ignore smile-associated wrinkles, mainly along the region of the eyes. These findings point to a misconception regarding the relationship between facial smile and perceived age and shed new light on the processes underlying human age perception.
人们在社交互动中微笑以传达不同类型的非语言交流。然而，微笑可能会潜在地改变人们在不同面部维度上被感知的方式，包括感知到的年龄。人们通常认为微笑的脸比面无表情的脸看起来更年轻。在本文报道的一系列实验中，我描述了一种与之相反的、意想不到且稳健的效应。在不同的实验条件和刺激组中，与同一个人的中性面部照片相比，微笑的脸始终被认为年龄更大。我认为这种效应是由于观察者未能忽略与微笑相关的皱纹，主要是眼睛周围的区域。这些发现指出了关于面部微笑与感知年龄之间关系的一种误解，并为人类年龄感知背后的过程提供了新的见解。
