Understanding People Through Faces
Pezibear / Pixabay
Do you ever take the time to look at a person’s face to see what it is communicating? We naturally decode emotions such as happiness, and sadness, anger and surprise, but do you look at a face deeper for more revealing information?
To my surprise most people don’t.
Do you look to see if someone is open or closed off? For example, in the photo above, do you think the girl would be receptive to you if you made a request to help you pick up some books in a school library? Or do you think she’d reject you? And why do you think that?
Do you think this girl is an extrovert or an introvert?
I don’t personally know this child, but she reveals key elements about her personality by her facial features and expression. She shows a very slight shyness. Can you see it? Yet she shows a symmetrical face. Symmetrical people are often very outgoing. Yet she shows a “grounded nature” about her–no arrogance or superiority. These attributes all can give you an indication of how someone might behave, if you think about it.
A slightly shy person is likely to be very polite. A symmetrical faced-person is likely quite social in comfortable settings. With these two things, I suspect this young girl would be helpful when asked to assist someone in a safe environment such as a library. She would be very polite.
Can you see that?
Faces reveal so much information about people, it’s truly astounding. And once you can discern a few elements from a face, you can logically deduce many other attributes about people successfully.
Take for example someone who shows tension on their face, when you see anger, do you think that person has a higher propensity to lash out? Of course they do. It’s not a guarantee, but its a higher propensity. Compare that person to a person with a relaxed happy face who shows a sign of anger. Do you think they would have a high probability to lash out? Not near as likely.
Here is an article that talks about some of the discoveries science is making about our face and personality:
Does Your Face Tell Anything About Your Personality?
Next time you have a few minutes, look at someone’s face and ponder some basic questions. Can you see if they are introverted or extroverted? Are they tense? Do they appear relaxed? Are their signs of stress in the face? What can these reveal?
How can you tell she has a “grounded nature”. Is it just that she doesn’t show any arrogance or superiority in her facial features, presumably most people don’t, or is there more to it than that?
It’s not in her emotional expression. I have a hard time articulating arrogance, but it can be seen in the face. About 10-15% of people show it. It’s not that rare.
Just wondering if arrogance shows in the way people hold their head erect, as if they are showing pride, and grounded people tend to look down more towards the ground, hence the description “grounded nature”? This is just something I have noticed, but then I could be putting a label on something that is not accurate? What say you?
It’s not necessarily so how a person holds their head that indicates arrogance or humility, but what you describe would be supportive of each time, just not 100% conclusive. Does that make sense?
It does make sense that it’s more subtle than that and the difficulty of explaining it in words. The look on the face has to be a reflection of something going on inside the person in how they perceive themselves or what they are telling themselves about themselves and their place in the world. Thank you for your response.
I feel like I’ve seen people before with a similar grounded look, I think they were all women from some southern state.
For me I feel like the similarity is somewhere horizontally in the middle of the face, like maybe the flatness below the eyes, and something with the eyes and finishing with the cheekbones.
This is really cool.
What makes you think most people don’t “look at a face deeper for more revealing information”.
I think most people get some sort of feel of a person by looking at them for a couple seconds. Maybe we just aren’t accurate enough to be able to go deeper.
Also, it’s sometimes frustrating that initial judgements color your perception of a person, and it’s hard to objectively label someone with a character trait, things seem complicated.
I wish there were a forum or something where people discussed their impression of people based on a few pictures, and then there was some way of knowing what they were really like.