A world of face masks 臉譜世界

We are all living in a world of images, pictures, videos and audios. When we fire up our wechat apps, you can have free video chats, live chats and even Discoveries where we can see what our friends or even friends of friends write or post. Everything is even instantaneous. All these, we are quite aware of.

What we are not aware of is that we constantly evaluate faces that we see and do so immediately without giving it a second thought. What judgements do we get when we evaluate faces?

According to a research published in 2008 with the tittle “The functional basis of face evaluation1”,

"Our findings suggest that faces are evaluated on two fundamental dimensions, valence and dominance. Whereas valence evaluation is an overgeneralization of perception of facial cues signaling whether to approach or avoid a person, dominance evaluation is an overgeneralization of perception of facial cues signaling the physical strength/weakness of the person.” (Figure 1)

The research's approach was to ask participants to “generate unconstrained descriptions of faces” which were then grouped into certain trait dimensions.

"Participants were then asked to judge the same faces on the trait dimensions and dominance". The results were subject to a “principal components analysis” which "identify two orthogonal dimensions, valence and dominance, which are sufficient to describe face evaluation”.

Among the trait judgement (e.g. trustworthy, attractive, aggressive, etc.), it was subsequently determined that trustworthiness was highly correlated to valence evaluation. (Figure 2)

In fact, trustworthiness increased “when faces seemed to change from expressing anger to expressing happiness” and dominance increased when “faces seemed to change from feminine and baby-faced to masculine and mature faced.” (Figure 1 and 3)

Figure 1:

Figure 2:

Figure 3:

It makes sense, doesn’t it?

When we see a person, we inherently want to know if the person should be avoided or not (i.e. risk avoidance). If that person looks angry and is strong and aggressive, we may want to avoid the person. If, on the contrary, the person looks friendly and happy and has a baby face, we may want to approach the person.

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臉譜世界

人無論在現實生活中或是在網絡世界裹都帶著很多不同的臉譜，見老細時一塊，見客户時又一塊，見下屬時又是另一塊，甚至見太太或情人都帶上不同的臉譜。到底是否能看穿這些臉譜，透過面相去了解一個人呢？究竟在這些臉譜後面代表著甚麽呢？

按近代西方科學家的研究認為人會不期然地透過觀察對方的面相去識别對方的善意或惡意。

曾國蕃指出＂相由心生，有感於內，必形於外＂。《大學》曰：＂此謂誠於中，形於外＂。

由此可知，人的外表（即形，貎，色甚至儀態）是身體內在的表象，故我們可以從表象判斷到其內在世界。

而透過中國的鑑人之術，我們能判斷到别人的個性，出身，健康，工作能力，可信度，財富與家庭關係等情况。但要做到正確判斷，就需經過明師指點及長時間的實際操作才能做到，既非一朝一夕，亦非與生俱来就做得到。

例如要判斷别人是否友善，我們需要從其面形，眉，眼，鼻，口等綜合判斷。

因此中國的鑑人之術經過長年的實踐及改進才能達到爐火純青的地步。而今天西方學者在最近十年才開始研究。

若果中國人不珍惜祖先遺留下來的智慧寶庫，而西方卻從後努力直追，則會否像龜兔賽跑一樣，由後發者先至，找到一個選拔人材及令自我進步的實用工具。

既然相由心生，那麽要看透不同的面譜，人便需要學習面相去了解人心。

Reference:

1. Oosterhof NN, Todorov A (2008) The functional basis of face evaluation. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105(32):11087–11092.

Originally posted at http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_532b25230102x0n4.html

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