This interdisciplinary overview integrates a variety of perspectives on the process and interpretation of faces as a major source of verbal and nonverbal communication. Written by authors from social, experimental, and cognitive psychology as well as from the dental sciences, Social and Applied Aspects of Perceiving Faces covers topics including normal variation in facial appearance and facial anomalies.
This interdisciplinary overview integrates a variety of perspectives on the process and interpretation of faces as a major source of verbal and nonverbal communication. Written by authors from social, experimental, and cognitive psychology as well as from the dental sciences, Social and Applied Aspects of Perceiving Faces covers topics including normal variation in facial appearance and facial anomalies.
In the past 30 years, face perception has become an area of major interest within psychology. This is the most comprehensive and commanding review of the field ever published.
The processes by which we recognise - or fail to recognise - another face have a perennial fascination for laymen and scientists alike. However, it is only in recent years that the problem has received systematic study by experimental psychologists. This book brings together such new information for the first time, in the form of a set of review articles, each written by a leading researcher in the field. Contributions have been grouped into those where the primary emphasis is upon theory and those where the major concern is with applied problems. Among the issues encompassed by the theory section are: face recognition in infants and children; disturbance associated with brain damage; social and racial aspects; the perception of emotion in the face and the significance of different physiognomic areas in mediating recognition. The relationship of face recognition, both to other memory processes and to information processing in general, is also extensively covered. In the applied section, areas considered include: psycho-legal aspects of identification with special reference to parades or 'line-ups'; studies of recall tools like 'Identikit' and 'Photofit'; the computerised identification and retrieval of facial images, and the effectiveness of training procedures designed to improve facial memory. Perceiving and Remembering Faces is invaluable to psychologists, whether academics working in higher education or applied practitioners such as clinical psychologists. The emphasis on practical as well as theoretical issues; however, ensures that the book is also of considerable interest to lawyers, criminologists and law enforcement specialists, or indeed to anyone whose work brings them into contact with that central enigma of all human perception and communication: the human face.
The human face is unique among social stimuli in conveying such a variety of different characteristics. A person's identity, sex, race, age, emotional state, focus of attention, facial speech patterns, and attractiveness are all detected and interpreted with relative ease from the face. Humans also display a surprising degree of consistency in the extent to which personality traits, such as trustworthiness and likeability, are attributed to faces. In the past thirty years, face perception has become an area of major interest within psychology, with a rapidly expanding research base. Yet until now, there has been no comprehensive reference work bringing together this ever growing body of research. The Oxford Handbook of Face Perception is the most comprehensive and commanding review of the field ever published. It looks at the functional and neural mechanisms underlying the perception, representation, and interpretation of facial characteristics, such as identity, expression, eye gaze, attractiveness, personality, and race. It examines the development of these processes, their neural correlates in both human and non-human primates, congenital and acquired disorders resulting from their breakdown, and the theoretical and computational frameworks for their underlying mechanisms. With chapters by an international team of leading authorities from the brain sciences, the book is a landmark publication on face perception. For anyone looking for the definitive text on this burgeoning field, this is the essential book.
Human faces are unique biological structures that convey a complex variety of important social messages. Even strangers can tell things from our faces – our feelings, our locus of attention, something of what we are saying, our age, sex and ethnic group, whether they find us attractive. In recent years there has been genuine progress in understanding how our brains derive all these different messages from faces and what can happen when one or other of the structures involved is damaged. Face Perception provides an up-to-date, integrative summary by two authors who have helped develop and shape the field over the past 30 years. It encompasses topics as diverse as the visual information our brains can exploit when we look at faces, whether prejudicial attitudes can affect how we see faces, and how people with neurodevelopmental disorders see faces. The material is digested and summarised in a way that is accessible to students, within a structure that focuses on the different things we can do with faces. It offers a compelling synthesis of behavioural, neuropsychological and cognitive neuroscience approaches to develop a distinctive point of view of the area. The book concludes by reviewing what is known about the development of face processing and re-examines the question of what makes faces ‘special’. Written in a clear and accessible style, this is invaluable reading for all students and researchers interested in studying face perception and social cognition.
Face perception is the process by which the brain and mind understand and interpret the face, particularly the human face. The face is an important site for the identification of others and conveys significant social information. Probably because of the importance of its role in social interaction, psychological processes involved in face perception are known to be present from birth, to be complex, and to involve large and widely distributed areas in the brain. These parts of the brain can be damaged to cause a specific impairment in understanding faces known as prosopagnosia. This book presents the latest research in the field.
The high degree of scientific interest in face processing is readily understandable, since people's faces provide such a wealth of social information. Moreover, investigations have produced evidence of highly precocious face processing abilities in infants, and of neural mechanisms in adults that seem to be differentially involved in face perception. Such findings demonstrate that, as one might expect, the psychological importance of the face has clear biological underpinnings.There are also urgent practical reasons for wanting to understand face processing. The most extensively investigated of these involve forensic issues. Other applications include the development of automated recognition systems for security and other purposes, and understanding and rehabilitating disorders and impairments linked to brain injuries and psychiatric conditions.Current studies of face processing are grouped in the volume into eleven topic areas. For each area, the editors approached an acknowledged authority and commissioned a review chapter summarising the findings that have been made. These chapters were then circulated to other experts who were asked to write brief commentaries that developed theoretical or empirical points of importance to each area. In this way, a balanced coverage of each topic is achieved.The book begins with a section examining the evidence suggesting that there may be something `special' about face processing. This is followed by consideration of the face as a visual pattern. Then there are four sections dealing with major uses of facial information, followed by sections discussing the development of face processing abilities and the neural mechanisms involved. The last three sections of the book deal with topics for which there are important practical applications for the studies reported.
This volume presents, in an integrated framework, contemporary perspectives on the role of nonverbal behavior in psychological regulation, adaptation, and psychopathology, and includes both empirical and theoretical research that is central to our understanding of the reciprocal influences between nonverbal behavior, psychopathology, and therapeutic processes. It has several objectives: One is to present fundamental theories and data relevant to researchers and clinicians working in such fields as psychopathology and psychotherapy. Another objective is to link contributions of basic research to clinical applications. Finally, the volume gathers contributions in different sub-fields that are rarely presented jointly, such as brain damage and non-verbal skills.
