International Research Fellowship Program: The Impact of Facial Resemblance on Social Behavior and its Mediating Psychological Mechanisms

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0401951DeBruineThe International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.This award will support a twenty-one-month research fellowship by Dr. Lisa M. DeBruine to work with Dr. David I. Perrett at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom.People have been shown to trust faces that look like them and to find these faces more attractive in some circumstances. This may be an adaptive response to a cue of kinship or a byproduct of perceptual mechanisms for face recognition. The aim of this project is to test these alternative explanations and to establish how responses to facial resemblance are affected by contextual cues, such as hormone levels. Responses to facial resemblance are being tested using face images made to resemble experimental participants using newly-developed computer-graphic techniques. Women's preferences for self-resembling faces are being assessed at different points in the menstrual cycle to test if women in the fertile stage have a relative aversion to self-resembling faces functioning to avoid inbreeding and if this aversion is specific to opposite-sex faces of an age relevant to mate choice. Pregnant women and new mothers are being similarly assessed to test if they have an increased preference for self-resembling faces functioning to facilitate nepotism. Expectant fathers are also being assessed to test if effects of facial resemblance are modulated by other cues of paternity probability. Demonstrations of such contextual sensitivities would provide support for the adaptive hypothesis and address the specificity of face encoding and kin recognition mechanisms.