Manipulating facial musculature with functional electrical stimulation as an intervention for major depressive disorder: a focused search of literature for a proposal.

BACKGROUND: Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is associated with interoceptive deficits expressed throughout the body, particularly the facial musculature. According to the facial feedback hypothesis, afferent feedback from the facial muscles suffices to alter the emotional experience. Thus, manipulating the facial muscles could provide a new "mind-body" intervention for MDD. This article provides a conceptual overview of functional electrical stimulation (FES), a novel neuromodulation-based treatment modality that can be potentially used in the treatment of disorders of disrupted brain connectivity, such as MDD. METHODS: A focused literature search was performed for clinical studies of FES as a modulatory treatment for mood symptoms. The literature is reviewed in a narrative format, integrating theories of emotion, facial expression, and MDD. RESULTS: A rich body of literature on FES supports the notion that peripheral muscle manipulation in patients with stroke or spinal cord injury may enhance central neuroplasticity, restoring lost sensorimotor function. These neuroplastic effects suggest that FES may be a promising innovative intervention for psychiatric disorders of disrupted brain connectivity, such as MDD. Recent pilot data on repetitive FES applied to the facial muscles in healthy participants and patients with MDD show early promise, suggesting that FES may attenuate the negative interoceptive bias associated with MDD by enhancing positive facial feedback. Neurobiologically, the amygdala and nodes of the emotion-to-motor transformation loop may serve as potential neural targets for facial FES in MDD, as they integrate proprioceptive and interoceptive inputs from muscles of facial expression and fine-tune their motor output in line with socio-emotional context. CONCLUSIONS: Manipulating facial muscles may represent a mechanistically novel treatment strategy for MDD and other disorders of disrupted brain connectivity that is worthy of investigation in phase II/III trials.

Fertility Status Does Not Facilitate Women's Judgment of Male Sexual Orientation.

Previous research has demonstrated that women can correctly distinguish between gay and heterosexual men's faces significantly better than chance. This ability appears to be heightened during the most fertile portion of their ovulatory cycle. Here, we sought to replicate and extend these findings in a large sample of undergraduate women (N = 1960). Although women correctly identified men's sexual orientation significantly better than chance (62% average accuracy), a subsample of naturally cycling women (n = 426) did not judge men's sexual orientation from faces more accurately when in the fertile phase of their ovulatory cycle. These results further replicate the visibility of male sexual orientation, but do not show that this ability has strong links to estimated fertility.

Narcissistic individuals exhibit poor recognition memory.

Here, we examine face memory among individuals who are self-focused and care little about others' needs: grandiose narcissists. Given narcissistic individuals' excessive self-focus and tendency to disregard the needs of others, they may struggle to recognize faces and their surrounding environment. Indeed, narcissistic individuals demonstrated worse recognition memory than non-narcissistic individuals in recognition memory tests for faces (Studies 1 [N = 332] and 2 [N = 261]). This difference also occurred for nonsocial stimuli (i.e., objects, houses, cars), suggesting a broad recognition deficit (Study 3A [N = 178], 3B [N = 203], 3C [N = 274]). Narcissistic individuals' excessive self-focus predicted this memory deficit (Study 4 [N = 187]). Grandiose narcissism may therefore influence visual recognition memory, highlighting the potential for future research linking personality and cognitive performance.

Emotion and Gender Typicality Cue Sexual Orientation Differently in Women and Men.

Heterosexual individuals tend to look and act more typical for their gender compared to gay and lesbian individuals, and people use this information to infer sexual orientation. Consistent with stereotypes associating happy expressions with femininity, previous work found that gay men displayed more happiness than straight men-a difference that perceivers used, independent of gender typicality, to judge sexual orientation. Here, we extended this to judgments of women's sexual orientation. Like the gender-inversion stereotypes applied to men, participants perceived women's faces manipulated to look angry as more likely to be lesbians; however, emotional expressions largely did not distinguish the faces of actual lesbian and straight women. Compared to men's faces, women's faces varied less in their emotional expression (appearing invariably positive) but varied more in gender typicality. These differences align with gender role expectations requiring the expression of positive emotion by women and prohibiting the expression of femininity by men. More important, greater variance within gender typicality and emotion facilitates their respective utility for distinguishing sexual orientation from facial appearance. These findings thus provide the first evidence for contrasting cues to women's and men's sexual orientation and suggest that gender norms may uniquely shape how men and women reveal their sexual orientation.

Accuracy and bias in first impressions of attachment style from faces.

OBJECTIVE: People gather important social information from subtle nonverbal cues. Given that one's attachment style can meaningfully affect the quality of one's relationships, we investigated whether people could perceive men's and women's attachment styles from photos of their neutral faces. METHOD: In two studies, we measured targets' attachment styles then asked participants (total N = 893) to judge the male and female targets' attachment anxiety and avoidance from photos of their neutral faces (total N = 331) and to report their own attachment anxiety and avoidance. RESULTS: Participants detected men's attachment style from face photos significantly better than chance in an initial exploratory study and in a preregistered replication but did not consistently detect women's attachment style from their face photos. Moreover, participants' own attachment style biased these first impressions: Individuals with greater attachment anxiety viewed others as more anxiously attached. CONCLUSIONS: People can detect some hints of unacquainted others' attachment styles from their faces but their own anxious attachment can bias these judgments.

Eyebrows cue grandiose narcissism.

OBJECTIVE: Though initially charming and inviting, narcissists often engage in negative interpersonal behaviors. Identifying and avoiding narcissists therefore carries adaptive value. Whereas past research has found that people can judge others' grandiose narcissism from their appearance (including their faces), the cues supporting these judgments require further elucidation. Here, we investigated which facial features underlie perceptions of grandiose narcissism and how they convey that information. METHOD AND RESULTS: In Study 1, we explored the face's features using a variety of manipulations, ultimately finding that accurate judgments of grandiose narcissism particularly depend on a person's eyebrows. In Studies 2A-2C, we identified eyebrow distinctiveness (e.g., thickness, density) as the primary characteristic supporting these judgments. Finally, we confirmed the eyebrows' importance in Studies 3A and 3B by measuring how much perceptions of narcissism changed when swapping narcissists' and non-narcissists' eyebrows between faces. CONCLUSIONS: Together, these data show that distinctive eyebrows reveal narcissists' personality to others, providing a basic understanding of the mechanism through which people can identify narcissistic personality traits with potential application to daily life.

Masculine Voices Predict Well-Being in Female-to-Male Transgender Individuals.

Voices convey important social information about an individual's identity, including gender. This is especially relevant to transgender individuals, who cite voice alteration as a primary goal of the gender alignment process. Although the voice is a primary target of testosterone therapy among female-to-male (FTM) trans people, little research has explored the effects of such changes on their psychological well-being. Here, we investigated how FTMs' vocal gender related to their well-being. A total of 77 FTMs (M age = 25.45 years, SD = 6.77) provided voice samples and completed measures of their well-being and psychological health. An independent group of 32 naïve raters (M age = 22.16 years, SD = 8.21) subsequently rated the voice samples for masculinity. We found that FTMs whose voices sounded more congruent with their experienced gender (i.e., sounded more masculine) reported greater well-being (better life satisfaction, quality of life, and self-esteem; lower levels of anxiety and depression) than FTMs with less gender congruent (i.e., more feminine) voices (ß = .48). The convergence between outwardly perceived vocal gender and gender identity brought about through hormone replacement therapy may therefore support greater well-being for FTMs.

Conservatives negatively evaluate counterstereotypical people to maintain a sense of certainty.

People frequently use physical appearance stereotypes to categorize individuals when their group membership is not directly observable. Recent research indicates that political conservatives tend to use such stereotypes more than liberals do because they express a greater desire for certainty and order. In the present research, we found that conservatives were also more likely to negatively evaluate and distribute fewer economic resources to people who deviate from the stereotypes of their group. This occurred for people belonging to both preexisting and novel groups, regardless of whether the stereotypes were real or experimentally fabricated. Critically, conservatives only negatively evaluated counterstereotypical people when the stereotypes were functional-that is, when they expected that they would need to use the stereotypes at a later point to categorize individuals into groups. Moreover, increasing liberals' desire for certainty led them to negatively evaluate counterstereotypical people just like conservatives did. Thus, conservatives are not only more likely to use stereotypes than are liberals, but are especially likely to negatively evaluate counterstereotypical people to organize the social world with greater certainty.

Perceptions of Sexual Orientation From Minimal Cues.

People derive considerable amounts of information about each other from minimal nonverbal cues. Apart from characteristics typically regarded as obvious when encountering another person (e.g., age, race, and sex), perceivers can identify many other qualities about a person that are typically rather subtle. One such feature is sexual orientation. Here, I review the literature documenting the accurate perception of sexual orientation from nonverbal cues related to one's adornment, acoustics, actions, and appearance. In addition to chronicling studies that have demonstrated how people express and extract sexual orientation in each of these domains, I discuss some of the basic cognitive and perceptual processes that support these judgments, including how cues to sexual orientation manifest in behavioral (e.g., clothing choices) and structural (e.g., facial morphology) signals. Finally, I attend to boundary conditions in the accurate perception of sexual orientation, such as the states, traits, and group memberships that moderate individuals' ability to reliably decipher others' sexual orientation.

Internalized Homophobia Influences Perceptions of Men's Sexual Orientation from Photos of Their Faces.

Although researchers have explored the perceiver characteristics that make people accurate at identifying others' sexual orientations, characteristics of the targets remain largely unexplored. In the current study, we examined how individual differences in internalized homophobia among gay men can affect perceptions of their sexual orientation by asking 49 individuals to judge the sexual orientations of 78 gay men from photos of their faces. We found that gay men reporting higher levels of internalized homophobia were less likely to have come out of the closet and were, in turn, less likely to be perceived as gay. Thus, internalized homophobia and the concealment of one's sexual minority status can impact perceptions of sexual orientation.

The Impact of Health, Wealth, and Attractiveness on Romantic Evaluation from Photographs of Faces.

A large literature suggests that men and women differ in their self-reported mate preferences such that men place greater weight on physical attractiveness than women do, whereas women value financial prospects more than men. Yet, little research has addressed how these differences generalize to other contexts, such as modern online dating in which mate selection may largely depend on visual cues. Distinct from the sex differences observed in previous studies relying on self-reports, we found that men and women both used perceptions of health and attractiveness to select hypothetical partners based on photographs of their faces. Importantly, although people reliably identified others' wealth from their photographs, these perceptions did not influence men's or women's partner selections. Thus, men and women may select romantic partners similarly based on limited visual information.

Predicting Firm Success From the Facial Appearance of Chief Executive Officers of Non-Profit Organizations.

Recent research has demonstrated that judgments of Chief Executive Officers' (CEOs') faces predict their firms' financial performance, finding that characteristics associated with higher power (e.g., dominance) predict greater profits. Most of these studies have focused on CEOs of profit-based businesses, where the main criterion for success is financial gain. Here, we examined whether facial appearance might predict measures of success in a sample of CEOs of non-profit organizations (NPOs). Indeed, contrary to findings for the CEOs of profit-based businesses, judgments of leadership and power from the faces of CEOs of NPOs negatively correlated with multiple measures of charitable success (Study 1). Moreover, CEOs of NPOs looked less powerful than the CEOs of profit-based businesses (Study 2) and leadership ratings positively associated with warmth-based traits and NPO success when participants knew the faces belonged to CEOs of NPOs (Study 3). CEOs who look less dominant may therefore achieve greater success in leading NPOs, opposite the relationship found for the CEOs of profit-based companies. Thus, the relationship between facial appearance and leadership success varies by organizational context.

Facial Trustworthiness Predicts Extreme Criminal-Sentencing Outcomes.

Untrustworthy faces incur negative judgments across numerous domains. Existing work in this area has focused on situations in which the target's trustworthiness is relevant to the judgment (e.g., criminal verdicts and economic games). Yet in the present studies, we found that people also overgeneralized trustworthiness in criminal-sentencing decisions when trustworthiness should not be judicially relevant, and they did so even for the most extreme sentencing decision: condemning someone to death. In Study 1, we found that perceptions of untrustworthiness predicted death sentences (vs. life sentences) for convicted murderers in Florida (N = 742). Moreover, in Study 2, we found that the link between trustworthiness and the death sentence occurred even when participants viewed innocent people who had been exonerated after originally being sentenced to death. These results highlight the power of facial appearance to prejudice perceivers and affect life outcomes even to the point of execution, which suggests an alarming bias in the criminal-justice system.

Individual differences in perceptions of gay men's sexual role preferences from facial cues.

Research has demonstrated that the sexual role preferences of gay men can be perceived with accuracies that exceed chance guessing from viewing photos of their faces. This research was conducted with only heterosexual perceivers making the categorizations. We therefore examined whether men who have sex with men (N = 121) were able to perceive sexual role preferences from faces and, critically, whether perceivers' masculinity, femininity, homonegativity, and own sexual role preference affected their categorizations of targets as "tops" or "bottoms." We found that men who have sex with men, like heterosexual perceivers in prior work, perceived gay men's sexual role preferences accurately. Furthermore, men who self-identified with a receptive (bottom) role were more accurate in their categorizations and male perceivers who self-reported higher levels of masculinity were more likely to categorize other men as bottoms. These findings suggest that men's masculinity could serve as a lens through which people perceive others and interact with the world.

Sexual orientation as a contextual frame for attractiveness judgments.

Despite strong consensus about the basic features that make someone look objectively attractive, contextual variation may modulate subjective assessments. Here, we investigate how social group membership provides such a context, comparing attractiveness judgments between lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) versus straight perceivers, and examining how these attractiveness judgments relate to beliefs about the target person's sexual orientation. We indeed find that perceivers rate targets as more attractive when they believe the target's sexual majority/minority status matches their own (Study 1). This association differs according to context, however: Although straight and LGB perceivers evaluate the components of facial attractiveness similarly (Study 2), straight men use attractiveness as a cue to sexual orientation (i.e., deeming unattractive women lesbians; Study 3) whereas LGB perceivers use sexual orientation as a cue to attractiveness (e.g., gay men rate men they believe are gay as more attractive than men they believe are straight; Studies 4 and 5). Thus, LGB identity seems to create a context in which sexual minority perceivers learn to attend to information about sexual diversity that straight perceivers may ignore. These findings highlight how group membership provides a lens for social perception, specifically pointing to how the contextual mindset of partner selection may transmute otherwise objective judgments, such as facial attractiveness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Addressing challenges to recovery and building future resilience in the wake of COVID-19.

While organisational crisis theory posits a predictable set of stages involving pre-planning and preparation, acute crisis response, adaptation and recovery, the prolonged and cyclical nature of public-health restrictions related to COVID-19 presented new challenges for institutions of higher education and conditioned students, faculty and staff to adopt a crisis mindset as their baseline. Consequently, moving from crisis to recovery posed unique obstacles at both individual (eg anxiety, exhaustion and post-traumatic stress) and organisational levels (eg transition logistics, labour market changes and student preparation). This paper describes an effort at a large, urban, research-intensive university to directly address the evolution from pandemic crisis to recovery and future resilience. The University Resilience Project recruited a team of senior staff charged with identifying and adopting promising practices created during the pandemic and decommissioning or archiving less useful policies, procedures and activities, with a view to strengthening the university's resilience. Over the course of more than 300 meetings with academic leaders, staff leaders and student leaders, team members created a space to share the experiences of COVID-19, reflect on successes and challenges over the crisis, and identify opportunities to enhance the resilience of the university. This work raised critical insights into the process of adapting to change in an institution of higher learning.

Social judgments from faces and bodies.

Despite the primacy of the face in social perception research, people often base their impressions on whole persons (i.e., faces and bodies). Yet, perceptions of whole persons remain critically underresearched. We address this knowledge gap by testing the relative contributions of faces and bodies to various fundamental social judgments. Results show that faces and bodies contribute different amounts to particular social judgments on orthogonal axes of social perception: Bodies primarily influence status and ability judgments, whereas faces primarily influence warmth-related evaluations. One possible reason for this may be differences in signal that bodies and faces provide for judgments along these two axes. To test this, we extended our investigation to social judgment accuracy, given that signal is a precondition to accuracy. Focusing on one kind of status/ability judgment-impressions of social class standing-we found that perceivers can discern individuals' social class standing from faces, bodies, and whole persons. Conditions that included bodies returned higher accuracy, indicating that bodies may contain more signal to individuals' social class than faces do. Within bodies, shape cued social class more than details of individuals' clothing. Altogether, these findings highlight the importance of the body for fully understanding processes and outcomes in person perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Accurate identification of a preference for insertive versus receptive intercourse from static facial cues of gay men.

In intercourse between men, one of the partners typically assumes the role of an insertive partner (top) while the other assumes a receptive role (bottom). Although some research suggests that the perceptions of potential partners' sexual roles in gay men's relationships can affect whether a man will adopt the role of top or bottom during sexual intercourse, it remains unclear whether sexual roles could be perceived accurately by naïve observers. In Study 1, we found that naïve observers were able to discern men's sexual roles from photos of their faces with accuracy that was significantly greater than chance guessing. Moreover, in Study 2, we determined that the relationship between men's perceived and actual sexual roles was mediated by perceived masculinity. Together, these results suggest that people rely on perceptions of characteristics relevant to stereotypical male-female gender roles and heterosexual relationships to accurately infer sexual roles in same-sex relationships. Thus, same-sex relationships and sexual behavior may be perceptually framed, understood, and possibly structured in ways similar to stereotypes about opposite-sex relationships, suggesting that people may rely on these inferences to form accurate perceptions.

Accuracy in categorizing perceptually ambiguous groups: a review and meta-analysis.

Since the 1940s, social psychologists have conducted research testing whether it is possible to accurately identify members of perceptually ambiguous groups. This study quantitatively reviews the research on the perception of ambiguous groups to better understand the human capacity to accurately identify others based on very subtle nonverbal cues. Standard random-effects meta-analytic techniques were used to examine the distinctions between different target groups in terms of their identifiability, as well as to compare rates of accuracy across perceptual modalities (e.g., photographs, audio, video) and other study design differences. Overall, the accuracy of identifying targets was significantly better than chance guessing (i.e., 64.5%). Furthermore, stimulus modality was found to be a moderator of accuracy. Other moderators (e.g., time of exposure, analytic approach) were identified and examined. These data help to document and characterize broad trends in the proliferating and expanding study of the perception and categorization of ambiguous social groups.

Emotions do reliably co-occur with predicted facial signals: Comment on Durán and Fernández-Dols (2021).

Durán and Fernández-Dols (see record 2022-03375-001) have done the field a service by conducting a meta-analytic review of the association between emotion experiences and facial expressions. Although they conclude that no meaningful association exists, our reading of their analyses suggest a different interpretation: The data that they report indicate an association of substantial magnitude-as large as 1.5 times the size of the average effect in social psychology and larger than 76% of meta-analytic effects previously reported throughout personality and social psychology (Gignac & Szodorai, 2016; Richard et al., 2003). Moreover, reexamination of some of the exclusion and classification choices made by Durán and Fernández-Dols (e.g., excluding intraindividual designs and studies purported to measure "amusement" from the primary analyses of "happiness") suggests that the observed large effects would be larger still if a more comprehensive set of studies had been included in their review. In sum, we conclude that Durán and Fernández-Dols' meta-analyses provide robust evidence that emotions do reliably co-occur with their predicted facial signals, although this conclusion is opposite to the one stated in their report. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).