[tips] Want to appear more rational? Put your right cheek forward.

[Jeffry Ricker, Ph.D.]

A paper just published in PLoS ONE looks at person perception with respect to profile pictures on faculty members' home pages. Here is their hypothesis: "Since there is an asymmetry in the degree to which emotional information is conveyed by the face, with the left side being more expressive than the right, we hypothesised that academics in the sciences would seek to pose as non-emotional rationalists and put their right cheek forward, while academics in the arts would express their emotionality and pose with the left cheek forward." In general, this is what they found, although not with psychology faculty, who pointed the left side of their faces towards the camera more than their "hard-science" colleagues. My profile picture, alas, is like many of my "touchy-feely" colleagues (see attached). Reference: Churches, O., Callahan, R., Michalski, D., Brewer, N., Turner, E., Keage, H. A. D., et al. (2012). How academics face the world: A study of 5829 homepage pictures. PLoS ONE 7(7): e38940. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0038940 Abstract It is now standard practice, at Universities around the world, for academics to place pictures of themselves on a personal profile page maintained as part of their University’s web-site. Here we investigated what these pictures reveal about the way academics see themselves. Since there is an asymmetry in the degree to which emotional information is conveyed by the face, with the left side being more expressive than the right, we hypothesised that academics in the sciences would seek to pose as non-emotional rationalists and put their right cheek forward, while academics in the arts would express their emotionality and pose with the left cheek forward. We sourced 5829 pictures of academics from their University websites and found that, consistent with the hypotheses, there was a significant difference in the direction of face posing between science academics and English academics with English academics showing a more leftward orientation. Academics in the Fine Arts and Performing Arts however, did not show the expected left cheek forward bias. We also analysed profile pictures of psychology academics and found a greater bias toward presenting the left check compared to science academics which makes psychologists appear more like arts academics than scientists. These findings indicate that the personal website pictures of academics mirror the cultural perceptions of emotional expressiveness across disciplines. --  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeffry Ricker, Ph.D. SCC: Professor of Psychology MCCCD: General Studies Faculty Representative PSY 101 Website: http://sccpsy101.wordpress.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scottsdale Community College 9000 E. Chaparral Road Scottsdale, AZ 85256-2626 Office: SB-123 Phone: (480) 423-6213 Fax: (480) 423-6298 --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=19789 (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) or send a blank email to leave-19789-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu