Assessing personality from facial features

Evidence suggests that some personality characteristics might be accurately identified from people's faces.

Specifically there is some evidence for the identification of psychoticism from facial cues. Psychoticism is a personality characteristic that is indicative of people who are cold, impersonal, impulsive, hostile, unemotional, paranoid and tough minded. However, extraversion and neuroticism are not so easily identified.

These were the findings of a preliminary study by Drs Mark Shevlin and Chris Lewis, from the University of Ulster at Magee College, and Stephanie Walker, Mark Davies and Phil Banyard from Nottingham Trent University presented on Wednesday 6 September 2000, to The British Psychological Society's Annual Social Psychology Conference at Nottingham Trent University.

Until now there has been experimental evidence that some attributions regarding personality characteristics from facial cues are accurate. However, previous studies have not manipulated the amount of facial information or used standard personality measures.

In this study the amount of facial information was varied and a standard personality measure was used. Sixty undergraduate students were asked to rate 36 photographs of students from another university, using a measure of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism in three different conditions, varied according to the amount of facial information.

The students whose photographs were used in the experiment had to rate themselves using the same three measures: extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism. The ratings by both groups (those in the photographs and those rating the photographs) were correlated to see if there were any relationships.

The findings show that there is a high degree of agreement among the participants on what facial characteristics are associated with psychoticism and that this is related to the psychoticism rating given by the person in the photograph.

Also, the more information that is presented the stronger the relationship. This is not the case for neuroticism or extraversion.

The authors suggest that this ability might have arisen through natural selection, as the ability to identify undesirable personality traits would be useful in successful mate selection.