Love at first sight and 面相

What is "Love at first sight”? Is it possible? or is it surreal?

Well, the author is not a psychologist nor a psychiatrist so he cannot give you a definitive answer to the question. But what interest the author most is the two words “first sight”.

By “first sight”, the author assume it means just a few quick glances or may be within just a few seconds or so? With just a few quick glances, what can one determines? Obviously, it means just looking at the external appearance of the person concerned, one can form some kind of judgments about the person or first impression. In other words, the question can be translated into "can someone trust or even fall in love with another person just by taking a few quick glances of another person’s external appearance”. To me, it means some kind of face reading or physiognomy.

So, is it possible or is it surreal?

According to the study “Modeling first impressions from highly variable facial images” published in 2014, it is possible to accurately predict first impressions formed by reading faces.

First impressions of social traits, such as trustworthiness or dominance, are reliably perceived in faces, and despite their questionable validity they can have considerable real-world consequences.

The researchers built a model "that can predict first impressions of previously unseen ambient images of faces from a linear combination of facial attributes". The researchers:

1. asked human raters to first rate each of 1,000 highly variable photographs of facial images by their judgments for first impression of 16 social traits;

2. deployed an AI neural network software to analyze the photographs to tag the images by 65 facial features (or attributes e.g. head width, mouth width, etc.) and to link the scores (of the 16 social traits) with the attributes;

3. then reversed the process by re-creating images of cartoon faces based on certain facial attributes that correspond to certain social traits; and, finally,

4. asked a new group of human raters to rate these recreated images by the social traits to test the validity of the model.

As it turned out, the model could explain 58% of the variance in human raters' social judgments of the same faces. That is to say first impression (i.e. social traits) is formed based on certain facial feature. But, of course, the researchers did question about the validity of first impression.

But can first impression be formed in a short period of time?

Yes, these first impressions could be formed from "a glimpse as brief as 100 ms or less even when no explicit evaluation is required".

In fact, according to another research "Evaluating faces on Trustworthiness after minimal time exposure” published in 2009 by a group of Princeton scientists, trustworthiness judgments from facial appearance is above chance "after 33 ms, improves with additional exposure , and does not improve with exposures longer than 167 ms". In other words, two tenth of a second is more than enough to form judgments about trustworthiness of a person.

Therefore, it is possible to form social traits judgments about a person based on a few glances of that person (i.e. face reading though usually done subconsciously). With these judgments together with the judgments of external attractiveness, it is possible to "Love at first sight".

But then, the next real question is the validity of such judgment.

Are they valid judgments?

As a student of Chinese physiognomy (i.e. the study of face), the author believe valid judgments of social traits can be formed with trained eyes.

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中國面相的歷史源遠流長。面相這門學問早於春秋年間已非常流行。

例如左傳一書有以下有關面相的記載（左傳的記錄範圍起自魯隱公元年（公元前722年），迄于魯哀公二十七年（公元前468年））：

《左傳》曰：「周內史叔服如魯，公孫敖聞其能相人也，見其二子焉。

　　叔服曰：『谷也食子，難也收子。谷也豐下，必有後於魯國。』」

此段記載在公元前626年，周襄王派內史叔服到魯國去參加婚禮的一個鑑相故事。由此可知，面相最晚于公元前626年已非常流行。而且當時的鑑相技巧亦已非常成熟及實用。

在現實生活中，筆者也親眼看到筆者的面相老師神乎其技的鑑相實例。因此，筆者對於鑑人之術的實用性和預測準確性非常有信心。

另外，上文提到 researchers 用65 facial features 來分析面相，也就是停留在形骸上的分析。而中國面相，除骨相、面相外，還講及神、氣與色相法。在層次上已非常深入複雜，不是目前西方的研究所能及也。

其實，兩份硏究都說明人人都不自覺地鑑别别人的面相（可能是天生自我保護的方法），只是由于未受過正式的中國面相訓練，因此得出的結論未必準確。

Reference:

1. Richard J. W. Vernon, Clare A. M. Sutherland, Andrew W. Young, and Tom Hartley, (2014) Modeling first impressions from highly variable facial images. http://www.pnas.org/content/111/32/E3353.full.pdf

2. Todorov A, Pakrashi M, Oosterhof NN, (2009) Evaluating faces on trustworthiness after minimal time exposure. Soc Cogn 27(6):813–833.

3. 周襄王派内史叔服前去鲁国参加鲁僖公的葬礼 http://baike.baidu.com/link?url=UlhS5q2pipJ0_omcSzFt686yHHzgXqX1m6a3GBwZ7Ak-r69UFMYimtgwd5pdSh3-I-6ZsDwxBNQEkEQr8-F7X_

Originally posted at: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_532b25230102wy52.html

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