Perceiving and Attributing Hemispheric Width in Faces of Normal Adults

Abstract

This study examined the effect of hemifacial width on attributions of personality and emotion in normal people with pronounced facial asymmetry. Ten attributions, made by 61 raters to the larger vs smaller hemifacial composites of the same face in 14 resting faces with pronounced asymmetry, were compared. Analysis showed that the smaller hemifaces were rated as exhibiting more intense emotions and as generally having more positive features than the larger hemifaces. The main implication of these findings is that faces with prominent asymmetry do not uniformly affect observers, but response may depend on the features of the hemiface (usually the right hemiface) perceived in the dominant visual field of the observers.