Faces and Their Perception – a Few Words on How People Process Facial Emotion Including Role of Some Personality Traits in This Process

Ewelina Kamasz

Abstract


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, the focus of attention and attractiveness can be all detected and interpreted from the face. Unfortunately, in contrast to other areas of psychological studies, such as memory, language, and attention, the study of face perception was a minority interest during the early years of cognitive psychology, and the topic received little or no attention in early cognitive psychology textbooks. The study of facial expression was much more fortunate, mainly thanks to a well-known series of studies of P. Ekman and his colleagues. Researchers have been aware for some time of the relationships between individual differences in personality and facial expression perception. A lot of researchers believe that the understanding of how facial expressions are processed is incomplete without taking account of personality-related individual differences. In this article, firstly, a review research addressing the field of face memory and face perception will be presented. Secondly, a discussion of the findings demonstrating the current state of knowledge of facial expression will be shown, including the relationship between personality traits and facial expression perception.


Keywords


face perception; face memory; facial expressions; personality

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/j.2018.31.4.307-322
Date of publication: 2019-04-26 10:22:50
Date of submission: 2018-08-02 19:39:17


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