Study On The Relationship Between Overall Tone Of Face And Perceived Healthiness

Faces are one of the most important information for interpersonal communication.In recent years,a new field of research has focused on the psychological significance of face color,among those is the role of face color in health judgment.Studies have shown that the redness,uniformity of the color of faces are closely related to adults' judgment on health condition.However,a vast majority of research was based on western adult faces,and there is a lack of research on how people from east use face color information for health judgment,when this face-health association occurs and how it continues to develop.In light of the above-mentioned shortcomings as well as the physical and cultural differences between the East and the West faces,the current study used two experiments to explore how Chinese adults use face color to judge healthiness,and how it develops during the early years.Experiment 1 asked three groups of Chinese adults: college students,middle-age medical professionals,middle-age controls to adjust facial color(CIELAB)based on their interpretation of three health conditions: healthy,malnutrition and anemia.The results showed that the three groups of subjects demonstrated similar adjustment along the redgreen axis,all of them associated higher redness with healthy state relative to malnutrition and anemia.In terms of the yellow-blue axis,there was significant interaction between participant group and health conditions,the college students used higher levels of yellowness for anemia,but the other two groups showed no differences in yellowness among the three health conditions.Experiment 2 explored the development of preschoolers' awareness of facial colorhealthiness association.Children in their 3-6 years old were recruited and completed two complementary tasks: the two-alternative forced choice task(AFC)and classification task.The results in the showed the 6-year-old children were more accurate in choosing the representative faces for the unhealthy condition(anemia)than younger children.However,surprisingly the accuracy in college students was much lower than the 6-year-old,which suggested face color might be a weaker cue for their judgment of health conditions.Similar results were replicated in the classification task.Taken together,our results found the consistent role of redness when Chinese adults perceive healthiness based on facial color,which replicated previous findings in Western cultures and suggested a culture-universal role of redness in health-face color association.Importantly,our results on adults contributed to the literature as we showed that there was interaction between participant group and healthy condition along the yellow-blue axis.This suggest that not all unhealthy conditions are processed equally and further research should not use the healthy vs.unhealthy dichotomy but consider the difference among unhealthy states.Meanwhile,our second experiment revealed the linear development of facial color-perceived healthiness association in preschoolers,but meanwhile suggested a complicated picture of the later trajectory.