Small Pupils Lead to Lower Judgements of a Person's Characteristics for Exaggerated, but Not for Realistic Pupils.

Our eyes convey information about a person. The pupils may provide information regarding our emotional states when presented along with different emotional expressions. We examined the effects of pupil size and vergence on inferring other people's characteristics in neutral expression eyes. Pupil sizes were manipulated by overlaying black disks onto the pupils of the original eye images. The disk area was then changed to create small, medium, and large pupils. Vergence was simulated by shifting the medium-sized disks nasally in one eye. Pupil sizes were exaggerated for Experiment 1 and followed values from the literature for Experiment 2. The first Purkinje image from the eye photos in Experiment 2 was kept to preserve image realism. The characteristics measured were sex, age, attractiveness, trustworthiness, intelligence, valence, and arousal. Participants completed one of two online experiments and rated eight eye pictures with differently sized pupils and with vergence eyes. Both experiments were identical except for the stimuli designs. Results from Experiment 1 revealed rating differences between pupil sizes for all characteristics except sex, age, and arousal. Specifically, eyes with extremely small pupil sizes and artificial vergence received the lowest ratings compared to medium and large pupil sizes. Results from Experiment 2 only indicated weak effects of pupil size and vergence, particularly for intelligence ratings. We conclude that the pupils can influence how characteristics of another person are perceived and may be regarded as important social signals in subconscious social interaction processes. However, the effects may be rather small for neutral expressions.

How sign language expertise can influence the effects of face masks on non-linguistic characteristics.

Face masks occlude parts of the face which hinders social communication and emotion recognition. Since sign language users are known to process facial information not only perceptually but also linguistically, examining face processing in deaf signers may reveal how linguistic aspects add to perceptual information. In general, signers could be born deaf or acquire hearing loss later in life. For this study, we focused on signers who were born deaf. Specifically, we analyzed data from a sample of 59 signers who were born deaf and investigated the impacts of face masks on non-linguistic characteristics of the face. Signers rated still-image faces with and without face masks for the following characteristics: arousal and valence of three facial expressions (happy, neutral, sad), invariant characteristics (DV:sex, age), and trait-like characteristics (attractiveness, trustworthiness, approachability). Results indicated that, when compared to masked faces, signers rated no-masked faces with stronger valence intensity across all expressions. Masked faces also appeared older, albeit a tendency to look more approachable. This experiment was a repeat of a previous study conducted on hearing participants, and a post hoc comparison was performed to assess rating differences between signers and hearing people. From this comparison, signers exhibited a larger tendency to rate facial expressions more intensely than hearing people. This suggests that deaf people perceive more intense information from facial expressions and face masks are more inhibiting for deaf people than hearing people. We speculate that deaf people found face masks more approachable due to societal norms when interacting with people wearing masks. Other factors like age and face database's legitimacy are discussed.

Face Masks Bolsters the Characteristics From Looking at a Face Even When Facial Expressions Are Impaired.

Face masks impact social interactions because emotion recognition is difficult due to face occlusion. However, is this enough to conclude that face masks negatively impact social interactions? We investigated the impact of face masks on invariant characteristics (sex, age), trait-like characteristics (trustworthiness, attractiveness, and approachability), and emotional expressions (happiness and excitability). Participants completed an online survey and rated masked and no-masked faces. The same face remained masked or no-masked throughout the survey. Results revealed that, when compared to no-masked faces, masked happy faces appeared less happy. Face masks did not negatively impact the ratings of other characteristics. Participants were better at judging the sex of masked faces. Masked faces also appeared younger, more trustworthy, more attractive, and more approachable. Therefore, face masks did not always result in unfavorable ratings. An additional post hoc modeling revealed that trustworthiness and attractiveness ratings for masked faces predicted the same trait ratings for no-masked faces. However, approachability ratings for no-masked faces predicted the same trait ratings for masked faces. This hinted that information from masked/no-masked faces, such as from the eye and eye region, could aid in the understanding of others during social interaction. Future directions were proposed to expand the research.