Formation of Impression Essay

The research investigates the aspects of attractiveness and face symmetry in terms of making a good first impression. The research indicates an SPSS investigation with a survey. Participants included 154 people of varied ages, genders, and ethnicities. They had to examine two photographs of the same person, one of which was symmetrical and the other not. They had to fill out a form expressing what they thought of those persons and which photo they preferred. According to the findings, there was a negative association between mood and images, and a positive correlation between photos and a person's sex. The research proved the point that people tend to pay a lot of attention to people’s “imperfections” and, because of them, strangers obtain the first impression.

Keywords: attention, attractiveness, correlation, ethnicity.





Impression Formation

The process of human perception of others is an important stage of building in interpersonal communication (Melwani et al. 2012). A lot of theoretical and applied research has been devoted to this problem, both in our country and abroad. Particular attention to these works is paid to the phenomenon to the formation of the first impression, which plays a role of a kind of psychological attitude to the perception of personality for quite a long time (Howle et al. 2016). A number of factors affect the first impression. The following three factors are the main ones: superiority: when one exceeds the observer by an important parameter, he is judged highly by him and by other significant parameters, which means that there is a kind of personal reassessment. Attractiveness implies that there is a regularity that people seem to appreciate a seemingly attractive person and on other parameters much higher. The attitude towards the observer means that people, who look good to others, or who share some important ideas with them, are assessed positively.

A person himself or herself, his or her appearance and behavior primarily determine what will be reflected in the impression (Kalokerinos, 2014). Therefore, the first part of the study was aimed at tracing the dependencies connecting the objective characteristics of the external appearance of a person: his or her physical appearance, expression, and the impression formed about him or her. Equally significant influence on the formation of the impression about a person previously unknown to us is the situation, in which conditions the knowledge of another person takes place. This situation is the second factor that determines the nature of the impression of a person. The second task of the research is to show the influence of the social background on which the formation of the impression unfolds, on its features.

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Miller used the method of competent judges, chosen from a large number of photographs of people, who were considered pretty, from the point of view of the judges. Additionally, there were people on the photos, who were considered ugly. He showed those faces to men and women aged 18 up to 24 years old, who made up the group of the main subjects, and asked them to speak out about the inner world of each of those who were pictured in the photograph. The subjects evaluated both men and women, who were attributed to the most beautiful, more self-assured, happy, sincere, balanced, energetic, amiable, resourceful, refined and richer spiritually than those, who, according to competent judges, were “declaredly” ugly and the differences were statistically significant. In addition, male subjects rated “beautiful” men and women whose pictures they saw as more directed toward other people, caring and attentive to them.

Nowadays, more than one study has been carried out that show that the “halo” of physical attractiveness causes many questions, not only when their object turns out to be personality traits, but also when the concrete result of a person’s activity or his individual action is evaluated. We can be influenced by the impression that one has taken in his posture. Thus, in one experiment, people acting as objects of forming the first impression were asked, in some cases, during a conversation with those whose impression was evaluated, to tilt their body forward, and in other cases to reject it, on the contrary, back (Senft et al. 2016). It turned out that in the first case, people, both men and women, liked those who perceived them more than in the second. In addition, women liked them more strongly if they were sitting in a calm pose and with uncrossed arms and legs.





Overview

This study aims at examining the impact of people’s appearance and body moves on the perception of them and the impression formation in general. In order to conduct the research, 147 students of the University of Massachusetts were asked to participate in the experiment. There was a survey, due to which the main criteria for people getting impressed by others are determined. As it was mentioned before, there are several ones that are important for a person getting an impression of someone. In the research, two criteria were used: attractiveness and character traits, in terms of one’s body moves.

Method

Participants

There were 147 University of Massachusetts Lowell general psychology students recruited through the Sona program to take our survey. They were chosen through a required part of the course that has the students taking a certain amount of surveys through Sona. The students got course credit through completing the study. The sample consisted of 79 females and 75 males. The age ranged from 18 to 46, with an average age of 28.20. There were 8 different ethnicities represented, including Asian, Black, Latino/ Hispanic, White, Mixed Race, Pacific Islander, and two considered “other”.

Measures

The first measure was attractiveness (Talamas et al). The attraction ratings were based off the idea that mouth curvature and eyelid openness would influence how attractive someone was. We based our study off this idea, but instead of controlling eyelid openness and mouth curvature we controlled for the symmetry of a woman’s face. There were only two target photos used, they were either a symmetric face or an asymmetric face. We did this in order to see if the attractiveness of the female played a role in how likable she was. From here we made a list of traits on a 10-point dichotomous scale to rate them from one extreme to the other (Forgas). The traits that were used were: Friendly- Unfriendly, Competent-Incompetent, Popular-Unpopular, Charismatic-Boring, Relaxed-Tense, Adventurous- Fearful, Extroverted-Introverted, Organized-Unorganized, Self-Confident- Shy and Trustworthy- Untrustworthy. This measure has been reliable in other studies; yet again we tweaked it for ours by adding four additional characteristics to get more information about the likability of the women in the picture. In the present sample, the reliability was adequate α = .81. The outcome measure is likeability and we will test this by looking at the answers to each of the trait questions.

Procedures

The participant was randomly assigned to write about a happy or sad memory. Each of the questions was stated as “We are interested in how people describe emotional experiences in their lives. Please write in detail about a sad, depressing (happy, euphoric) episode in your past.” After this the participants were randomly directed to either a symmetrical or an asymmetrical face (figures 1A and 1B). The traits (Friendly- Unfriendly, Competent-Incompetent, Popular-Unpopular, Charismatic-Boring, Relaxed-Tense, Adventurous- Fearful, Extroverted-Introverted, Organized-Unorganized, Self-Confident- Shy and Trustworthy- Untrustworthy) were listed below and the participant had to choose on a 6-point scale, which trait side the women seemed to represent more. We used the even 6 points to make participants choose one side or the other so we wouldn’t get any average ratings.







Results

Descriptive Statistics

Initially, there were 154 participants; however, seven of them did not take part in the survey, for the reason that they were excluded. Of the 154 persons, all of them paid the most of their attention to ethnicity and sex, 151 of them considered age important and 153 of all persons were considering the pictures. Paying much attention to ethnicity, sex and age, when obtaining an impression of other people, was expected, since that is how people evaluate others (Mattarozzi et al. 2015). They start with appearance. Ethnicity is the most noticeable factor. Age is considered too. It is a stereotype that older people rarely accept younger ones seriously. Additionally, the standard deviations and means prove the point that appearance is of great importance; however, later, due to body moves and one showing his or her character features, the main impression is obtained (Rule et al, 2016). As for age, we can see that the mean age is 20.28, as well as the biggest sympathy the participants had to white people (M= 4.03). Nonetheless, participants of both sexes expressed almost the same opinion about what they saw on the photos.

Correlations

According to Pearson Correlation, a negative one exists for the indicators of mood with photos and likes (-163 and -096). A positive correlation is possible for the indicators of photos with sex (.75 and .85). These indicators imply that seeing a photo of a person influences one’s mood not significantly and makes a person like or dislike a person that he or she saw on a picture. However, if this is only one option to get some impression from a person or a multiple people, a photo would help to obtain it. On the other hand, one’s appearance cannot impact the impression much, for the reason that it creates one only partly and, subconsciously, one expects that a person is different than he or she seems.

Discussion

Various regressions were used, in order to determine how our participants got their first impressions. The hypothesis that people obtain their first impression only after estimating someone’s appearance was applied, because many stereotypes exist and, also, it is easy to notice that the modern world is concerned about people’s appearance and the perfect look. The results of the study prove the point that people judge not really the proportions of one’s face or body, but what one expresses with his or her look; whether one is confident or not, whether he or she is afraid of something (Kocsor and Bereczkei, 2017) . In fact, it is so easy to “read” faces. This experiment also proved that impressions are able to influence other people’s mood and readiness to like someone. Anyway, appearance and attractiveness play a huge role in people’s lives. In some spheres, like modeling, for example, attractiveness is the only criterion that is important and even if a model is not confident as a person, she would not leave her job, because the way she looks is the most important thing.





















References

Forgas, J. P., Bower, G. H, (1987). “Mood Effects on Person-Perception Judgments”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 53, no. 1, 53-60.

Howle, T. C., Jackson, B., & Dimmock, J. A. (2016). “On the formation of favorable impressions: Associations between self-presentation motives, task behavior, and others’ evaluations of the self in a team-sport setting.” Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 2640-47. doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2016.06.002

Kalokerinos, Elise K., Katharine H. Greenaway, David J. Pedder, and Elise A. Margetts. “Don’t Grin When You Win: The Social Costs of Positive Emotion Expression in Performance Situations.” Emotion 14.1 (2014): 180-86. PsycINFO. Web. 27 Jan. 2017.

Kocsor, F., & Bereczkei, T. (2017). “Evaluative conditioning leads to differences in the social evaluation of prototypical faces.” Personality and Individual Differences, 104215-219. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2016.08.007

Mattarozzi, K., Todorov, A., Marzocchi, M., Vicari, A., & Russo, P. M. (2015). “Effects of gender and personality on first impression.” Plos ONE, 10(9).

Melwani, S., Mueller, J. S., & Overbeck, J. R. (2012). “Looking down: The influence of contempt and compassion on emergent leadership categorizations.” Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(6), 1171-1185. doi:10.1037/a0030074

Rule, N. O., & Alaei, R. (2016). “ ‘Gaydar’: The perception of sexual orientation from subtle cues.” Current Directions In Psychological Science, 25(6), 444-448. doi:10.1177/0963721416664403

Senft, Nicole, Yulia Chentsova-Dutton, and George A. Patten. “All Smiles Perceived Equally: Facial Expressions Trump Target Characteristics in Impression Formation.” Motivation and Emotion 40.4 (2016): 577-87. PsycINFO. Web. 27 Jan. 2017.

Talamas, Sean N., Kenneth I. Mavor, John Axelsson, Tina Sundelin, and David I.Perrett. “Eyelid-openness and Mouth Curvature Influence Perceived Intelligence beyond Attractiveness.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 145.5 (2016): 603-20. PsycINFO. Web. 27 Jan. 2017.