For social animals, such as we are, social interactions form an integral part of our everyday life. Impairments in social behaviour lead to decreased quality of life and are often associated with mental disorders. The human face is a highly relevant stimulus in social interaction, as it’s an important source for nonverbal communication. A face contains intricate information on the basis of which a friend can be distinguished from a stranger, a woman from a man and old people can be differentiated from young. From a face we also judge whether the owner is attractive, where her attention is, what mood she is in and even whether we can trust her. In this workshop I will start by presenting research on face recognition and we will discuss whether or not human beings are experts in face processing. I will then describe the most important social cues in faces and will then move to attractiveness perception, a topic I have been intensively working on over the last decade. In the workshop I will also cover the methods we use when we study the role of the human face in social interacitons.
PD Dr. Janek Lobmaier
PD Dr. Janek Lobmaier is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Neuroscience and Social Psychology in the Institute of Psychology in Bern. He is an experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist, with research interests ranging from emotion recognition to mate preferences, cooperation and perception of infant faces of both human and non-human species.
