Department of Psychology, University of York, UK.
School of Psychological Science, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia.
Br J Psychol. 2020 May;111(2):215-232. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12390. Epub 2019 Mar 29.
Influential facial impression models have repeatedly shown that trustworthiness, youthful-attractiveness, and dominance dimensions subserve a wide variety of first impressions formed from strangers' faces, suggestive of a shared social reality. However, these models are built from impressions aggregated across observers. Critically, recent work has now shown substantial inter-observer differences in facial impressions, raising the important question of whether these dimensional models based on aggregated group data are meaningful at the individual observer level. We addressed this question with a novel case series approach, using factor analyses of ratings of twelve different traits to build individual models of facial impressions for different observers. Strikingly, three dimensions of trustworthiness, youthful/attractiveness, and competence/dominance appeared across the majority of these individual observer models, demonstrating that the dimensional approach is indeed meaningful at the individual level. Nonetheless, we also found differences in the stability of the competence/dominance dimension across observers. Taken together, results suggest that individual differences in impressions arise in the context of a largely common structure that supports a shared social reality.
有影响力的面部印象模型反复表明，可信度、年轻吸引力和支配维度可以服务于从陌生人面部形成的各种第一印象，暗示了一种共同的社会现实。然而，这些模型是从观察者的印象中综合而来的。重要的是，最近的研究表明，观察者之间的面部印象存在很大差异，这就提出了一个重要的问题，即基于群体数据综合的这些维度模型在个体观察者层面上是否有意义。我们使用一种新的病例系列方法解决了这个问题，对十二种不同特征的评分进行因子分析，为不同的观察者建立面部印象的个体模型。引人注目的是，在大多数这些个体观察者模型中，都出现了可信度、年轻/吸引力和能力/支配三个维度，这表明维度方法在个体层面上确实是有意义的。尽管如此，我们还发现了观察者之间能力/支配维度稳定性的差异。综上所述，研究结果表明，印象的个体差异是在一个支持共同社会现实的共同结构的背景下产生的。
