Face Research @ UWE Bristol

Current studies on different aspects of social face perception

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Participate in online experiments!

We are currently looking for participants for several undergrad dissertation projects undertaken as part of a BSc (Hons) in Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol. If you’re interested in taking part, please click the title of the study to learn more and start participating!

Please note these studies will not run on mobile devices.


Impression Formation

Impression formation and trust

You have the choice to enter into a raffle for a £50 Amazon Voucher for taking part!

Current research suggests that social judgments can be made from faces within an extremely short time and often without much mental effort. Here, we are interested in how judgments interact with information about people’s behaviour in forming perceptions of trust.

Impression formation and makeup

This online study is looking for participants that identify as women and are aged 18 to 45. It is investigating the relationship between self-perceptions, cosmetic wearing and competitiveness. In today’s (social) media-saturated society, young women especially are thought to experience both pressure to conform to societal appearance-based ideals as well as competition with each other. Here, we want to investigate the ways in which women manipulate cosmetic appearance in a range of different scenarios.

Smiling: a diverse perspective

Current research suggests that smiling elicits more positive perceptions by others compared to a neutral expression, for attributes such as attractiveness and perceived personality traits like agreeableness. This effect appears particularly pronounced when hetereosexual men judge women’s face images, which has been interpreted as evidence that women may more effectively employ (and benefit from) smiling in inter-sexual relationships. Here, we are interested in whether these effects can be replicated with a more diverse stimulus set, and exploring the effect of individual differences in perceived sexual interest.


Emotion Perception

Emotion perception and gender-typicality

Current research suggests that men and women differ in the accuracy with which they perceive facial emotions: on average, women tend to do better in recognising subtle facial expressions compared to men. Here, we are interested in exploring this sex difference as well as whether gender-typicality has an effect on facial emotion recognition capabilities (e.g., do more feminine men perform better in facial emotion recognition compared to more masculine men?).

Emotion perception and effects of mood and culture

Recruiting Arab/Middle Eastern and British/European participants to take part in an online task. The study will examine your facial emotion recognition abilities whilst taking your mood and cultural background into consideration.


Facial Attractiveness

Facial attractiveness and effects of shape and colour cues

You are invited to take part in a study on how sex-typical facial shape and colour cues affect face preferences. You will complete a short questionnaire before being presented with a number of face images: Your aim will be to maximize faces’ attractiveness by manipulating them on different dimensions.

Facial attractiveness and effects of expression and symmetry

You are invited to take part in my study exploring facial attractiveness! You will be asked to rate a number of faces on their attractiveness and answer a few questions on your demographic background and your competitiveness.


Contact

If you’d like to learn more about any of these studies or would like to get in touch for other reasons, you can also contact Dr. Iris Holzleitner, who is supervising these projects.

Last updated: 2022-03-31