Social transmission of leadership preference:knowledge of group membership and partisan media reporting moderates perceptions of leadership ability from facial cues to competence and dominance

While first impressions of dominance and competence can influence leadership preference, social transmission of leadership preference has received little attention. The capacity to transmit, store and compute information has increased greatly over recent history, and the new media environment may encourage partisanship (i.e. ‘echo chambers’), misinformation and rumour spreading to support political and social causes and be conducive both to emotive writing and emotional contagion, which may shape voting behaviour. In our pre-registered experiment, we examined whether implicit associations between facial cues to dominance and competence (intelligence) and leadership ability are strengthened by partisan media and knowledge that leaders support or oppose us on a socio-political issue of personal importance. Social information, in general, reduced well-established implicit associations between facial cues and leadership ability. However, as predicted, social knowledge of group membership reduced preferences for facial cues to high dominance and intelligence in out-group leaders. In the opposite-direction to our original prediction, this ‘in-group bias’ was greater under less partisan versus partisan media, with partisan writing eliciting greater state anxiety across the sample. Partisanship also altered the salience of women’s facial appearance (i.e., cues to high dominance and intelligence) in out-group versus in-group leaders. Independent of the media environment, men and women displayed an in-group bias toward facial cues of dominance in same-sex leaders. Our findings reveal effects of minimal social information (facial appearance, group membership, media reporting) on leadership judgements, which may have implications for patterns of voting or socio-political behaviour at the local or national level

Own attractiveness and perceived relationship quality shape sensitivity in women’s memory for other men on the attractiveness dimension

Although recent work suggests that opposite-sex facial attractiveness is less salient in memory when individuals are in a committed romantic relationship, romantic relationship quality can vary over time. In light of this, we tested whether activating concerns about romantic relationship quality strengthens memory for attractive faces. Partnered women were exposed briefly to faces manipulated in shape cues to attractiveness before either being asked to think about a moment of emotional closeness or distance in their current relationship. We measured sensitivity in memory for faces as the extent to which they recognized correct versions of studied faces over versions of the same person altered to look either more or less-attractive than their original (i.e. studied) version. Contrary to predictions, high relationship quality strengthened hit rate for faces regardless of the sex or attractiveness of the face. In general, women’s memories were more sensitive to attractiveness in women, but were biased toward attractiveness in male faces, both when responding to unfamiliar faces and versions of familiar faces that were more attractive than the original male identity from the learning phase. However, findings varied according to self-rated attractiveness and a psychometric measure of the quality of their current relationship. Attractive women were more sensitive to attractiveness in men, while their less-attractive peers had a stronger bias to remember women as more-attractive and men as less-attractive than their original image respectively. Women in better-quality romantic relationships had stronger positive biases toward, and false memories for, attractive men. Our findings suggest a sophisticated pattern of sensitivity and bias in women’s memory for facial cues to quality that varies systematically according to factors that may alter the costs of female mating competition (‘market demand’) and relationship maintenance

Women’s facial redness increases their perceived attractiveness : mediation through perceived healthiness

In the present research, we investigated whether the red-attraction relation that has been observed for men viewing women may also be observed with regard to women’s facial redness. We manipulated facial redness by slightly increasing or decreasing the redness on the faces of baseline pictures of target women, and then had men judge the attractiveness of the women. We also examined healthiness perceptions as a mediator of the redness-attraction relation, along with several other candidate mediator variables. A series of experiments showed that increased redness led to increased ratings of attractiveness, and decreased redness led to decreased ratings of attractiveness. Perceived healthiness was documented as a mediator of the influence of female facial redness on male perceptions of attractiveness, and this mediation was independent of other candidate mediator variables. The findings highlight the importance of attending to facial coloration as an attraction-relevant cue and point to interesting areas for subsequent research.PostprintPeer reviewe

Assessment of health in human faces is context-dependent

This work was supported by the National Environment Research Council, UK (KM), Unilever Research & Development USA and the Economic and Social Research Council (RW, DP).When making decisions between options, humans are expected to choose the option that returns the highest benefit. In practice, however, adding inferior alternatives to the choice set can alter these decisions. Here we investigated whether decisions over the facial features that people find healthy looking can also be affected by the context in which they see those faces. To do this we examined the effect of choice set on the perception of health of images of faces of light-skinned Caucasian females. We manipulated apparent facial health by changing yellowness of the skin: the healthy faces were moderately yellow and the less healthy faces were either much more yellow or much less yellow. In each experiment, two healthy faces were presented along with a third, less healthy face. When the third face was much more yellow, participants chose the more yellow of the two healthy faces more often as the most healthy. However, when the third face was the least yellow, participants chose the less yellow of the two healthy faces more often. A further experiment confirmed that this result is not due to a generalised preference for an intermediate option. These results extend our understanding of context-dependent decision-making in humans, and suggest that comparative evaluation may be a common feature across many different kinds of choices that humans have to make.Peer reviewe

Cross-cultural effects of color, but not morphological masculinity, on perceived attractiveness of men's faces

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ElsevierMuch attractiveness research has focused on face shape. The role of masculinity (which for adults is thought to be a relatively stable shape cue to developmental testosterone levels) in male facial attractiveness has been examined, with mixed results. Recent work on the perception of skin color (a more variable cue to current health status) indicates that increased skin redness, yellowness, and lightness enhance apparent health. It has been suggested that stable cues such as masculinity may be less important to attractiveness judgments than short-term, more variable health cues. We examined associations between male facial attractiveness, masculinity, and skin color in African and Caucasian populations. Masculinity was not found to be associated with attractiveness in either ethnic group. However, skin color was found to be an important predictor of attractiveness judgments, particularly for own-ethnicity faces. Our results suggest that more plastic health cues, such as skin color, are more important than developmental cues such as masculinity. Further, unfamiliarity with natural skin color variation in other ethnic groups may limit observers' ability to utilize these color cues

The Rise Time of Type Ia Supernovae from the Supernova Legacy Survey

We compare the rise times of nearby and distant Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) as a test for evolution using 73 high-redshift spectroscopically-confirmed SNe Ia from the first two years of the five year Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) and published observations of nearby SN. Because of the ``rolling'' search nature of the SNLS, our measurement is approximately 6 times more precise than previous studies, allowing for a more sensitive test of evolution between nearby and distant supernovae. Adopting a simple $t^2$ early-time model (as in previous studies), we find that the rest-frame $B$ rise times for a fiducial SN Ia at high and low redshift are consistent, with values $19.10^{+0.18}_{-0.17}({stat}) \pm 0.2 ({syst})$ and $19.58^{+0.22}_{-0.19}$ days, respectively; the statistical significance of this difference is only 1.4 \sg . The errors represent the uncertainty in the mean rather than any variation between individual SN. We also compare subsets of our high-redshift data set based on decline rate, host galaxy star formation rate, and redshift, finding no substantive evidence for any subsample dependence.Comment: Accepted for publication in AJ; minor changes (spelling and grammatical) to conform with published versio

Type Ia Supernovae Rates and Galaxy Clustering from the CFHT Supernova Legacy Survey

The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) has created a large homogeneous database of intermediate redshift (0.2 < z < 1.0) type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). The SNLS team has shown that correlations exist between SN Ia rates, properties, and host galaxy star formation rates. The SNLS SN Ia database has now been combined with a photometric redshift galaxy catalog and an optical galaxy cluster catalog to investigate the possible influence of galaxy clustering on the SN Ia rate, over and above the expected effect due to the dependence of SFR on clustering through the morphology-density relation. We identify three cluster SNe Ia, plus three additional possible cluster SNe Ia, and find the SN Ia rate per unit mass in clusters at intermediate redshifts is consistent with the rate per unit mass in field early-type galaxies and the SN Ia cluster rate from low redshift cluster targeted surveys. We also find the number of SNe Ia in cluster environments to be within a factor of two of expectations from the two component SNIa rate model.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, 6 tables, accepted for publication in A

Cognitive demands of face monitoring: Evidence for visuospatial overload

Young children perform difficult communication tasks better face to face than when they cannot see one another (e.g., Doherty-Sneddon & Kent, 1996). However, in recent studies, it was found that children aged 6 and 10 years, describing abstract shapes, showed evidence of face-to-face interference rather than facilitation. For some communication tasks, access to visual signals (such as facial expression and eye gaze) may hinder rather than help children’s communication. In new research we have pursued this interference effect. Five studies are described with adults and 10- and 6-year-old participants. It was found that looking at a face interfered with children’s abilities to listen to descriptions of abstract shapes. Children also performed visuospatial memory tasks worse when they looked at someone’s face prior to responding than when they looked at a visuospatial pattern or at the floor. It was concluded that performance on certain tasks was hindered by monitoring another person’s face. It is suggested that processing of visual communication signals shares certain processing resources with the processing of other visuospatial information

Longer fixation duration while viewing face images

The spatio-temporal properties of saccadic eye movements can be influenced by the cognitive demand and the characteristics of the observed scene. Probably due to its crucial role in social communication, it is argued that face perception may involve different cognitive processes compared with non-face object or scene perception. In this study, we investigated whether and how face and natural scene images can influence the patterns of visuomotor activity. We recorded monkeys’ saccadic eye movements as they freely viewed monkey face and natural scene images. The face and natural scene images attracted similar number of fixations, but viewing of faces was accompanied by longer fixations compared with natural scenes. These longer fixations were dependent on the context of facial features. The duration of fixations directed at facial contours decreased when the face images were scrambled, and increased at the later stage of normal face viewing. The results suggest that face and natural scene images can generate different patterns of visuomotor activity. The extra fixation duration on faces may be correlated with the detailed analysis of facial features

Attentive Learning of Sequential Handwriting Movements: A Neural Network Model

Defense Advanced research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-92-J-1309); National Science Foundation (IRI-97-20333); National Institutes of Health (I-R29-DC02952-01)