Relationships between physical traits and subjective impressions of faces - age and gender information

Abstract

This article presents two studies investigating the relationships between physical measurements and psychological judgments of human faces. The first study is concerned with gender and age classification, the second with femininity-masculinity and childlike-adultlike judgments of Japanese faces. The results indicate that (1) faces can be accurately classified into age categories based on physical measurements, (2) whereas age classification depends on the global information of a face, gender classification depends on its local information, and (3) the femininity-masculinity judgment of male faces tends to be made on the basis of age information. The authors relate these results to the processing of KANSEI-infonnation of, or subjective feelings about, a biological stimulus.