Abstract
Social status hierarchies are a universal principle of organization in human societies. Status judgments are often influenced by perceptions of the face and posture. Two important nonverbal cues of social status are head postures and eye gaze. Prior research has shown contradictory results and little is known about the interaction of these two cues. Study 1 investigated how eye gaze (direct vs. averted) and head postures (bowed vs. neutral vs. raised) impact judgments of dominance and physical strength. Judgments of dominance were influenced more than judgments of physical strength. Furthermore, raised heads implied dominance and strength, but in contrast to common assumptions, a bowed head conveyed dominance if the eyes gazed at the observer. Study 2 showed that bowed heads with direct gaze conveyed anger, potentially explaining the increased judgments of dominance. Taken together, the results show that head posture and gaze interactively modulated status-related traits and emotions, namely, dominance, strength, and anger, and help clarify prior incompatible findings on head postures and eye gaze.
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We used the ± 25 degrees due to practical reasons related to FaceGen. These degrees of tilt is the maximum tilt at which the targets’ eyes and, consequently, their gazes can still be clearly seen. For this reason, we used these levels to manipulate our targets’ head positions in order to maximize the tilt manipulation while still enabling the gaze manipulation.
We ran an additional study on Amazon Mturk where we asked participants (N = 84) to judge the perceived gaze of the target faces. We wanted to check if the faces with direct gaze were really perceived as looking directly towards participants and if the faces with averted gaze were seen by participants as looking away from them. Participants had to judge on a scale from -3 (looks away from me) to + 3 (looks directly at me). The methodology was otherwise identical to the main studies. Perceived gaze judgments were influenced by gaze direction, F(1, 707.27) = 8177.8, p < .001. Faces with direct gaze were perceived as looking more towards the participants (M = 1.60 [1.44, 1.75]) than faces with averted gaze (M = -2.30 [− 2.51, − 2.09]), B = 1.94 [1.90, 1.98], β = 0.16. However, we found an interaction between head posture and gaze direction, F(1, 708.795) = 15.35, p < .001, B = − 0.10 [− 0.15, − 0.05], β = − 0.01—albeit this effect was much weaker than the main effect of gaze. When the gaze was direct, faces with bowed heads were perceived as having more direct gaze (M = 2.17 [2.03, 2.31]) than faces with raised heads (M = 1.53, [1.39, 1.67], p < .001), and neutral heads (M = 1.07 [0.93, 1.21], p < .001). Faces with bowed heads were also judged as having more direct gaze than faces with neutral heads (p < .001). When the gaze was averted, both faces with bowed heads (M = − 2.22, [− 2.37, − 2.08]), and neutral heads (M = − 2.20 [− 2.34, − 2.06]) were judged as having less averted gaze than faces with raised heads (M = − 2.46 [− 2.60, − 2.32], p < .001). Faces with bowed heads and neutral heads did not show significant differences (p = .70). Due to these results, we re-ran the analyses of Study 1 and Study 2, substituting the judged directness of the gaze for the gaze contrast. We found essentially the same results except a strengthened linear head contrast effect on dominance. See discussion and Supplementary materials file – Study 1 and Study 2 with perceived gaze as an independent variable. Note, however, that the pictures we intended to show direct gaze were not all judged as looking directly into the camera, which is a limitation of our study and might have attenuated effects.
In this definition, we associate motivation and potential to influence in order to define dominance. Influence is one of the main qualities of social dominance (e.g., Cheng et al., 2013).
Due to a programming mistake, 2 sets of the total 12 missed one face in all samples. Thus, these participants judged only 59 faces twice (118 judgments in total).
More recently, Schneider and Carbon (2017) asked participants to judge faces on dominance. In contrast to previous studies, they did not find an effect of head posture. Raised heads were not perceived as more dominant than bowed heads. Given the presence of muscles around human necks and the role of muscular strength in perceiving dominance (e.g., Toscano et al., 2016), the authors wrote that one likely reason for these results was that they only showed faces without necks. Therefore, it might be the case that our stimuli, where the necks can be seen by the participants, could have influenced our data. However, as it can be seen in Fig. 1, bowed heads exposed less their necks than neutral and raised heads, but were perceived as more dominant than the former. Nonetheless, we suggest that further studies investigating the effects found in our research should only use faces without necks.
We ran an additional study and found that both female and male faces were correctly identified. We asked participants (N = 90) on Amazon MTurk to select the gender of the faces used in both studies. Male faces were identified as males in 99% of the cases, p < .001. Female faces were selected as female in most cases (91%), p < .001.
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This research was conducted with support from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) Grant SFRH/BD/75435/2010.
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Toscano, H., Schubert, T.W. & Giessner, S.R. Eye Gaze and Head Posture Jointly Influence Judgments of Dominance, Physical Strength, and Anger. J Nonverbal Behav 42, 285–309 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-018-0276-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-018-0276-5