When one looks at a face, one cannot help but ‘read’ it: in the blink of an eye, people form reliable impressions of both transient psychological states (e.g., happiness) and stable character traits (e.g., trustworthiness). Such impressions are irresistible, formed with high level of consensus, and important for social decisions. Researchers at Princeton University and Stevens Institute of Technology have together developed a large-scale data-driven methodology that allows for the easy manipulation of social trait information in hyper-realistic face images. This is the very first software design to allow for automatic, photorealistic manipulation of real face images along psychological traits. For example, a given face image could be made to look more or less trustworthy by moving a simple slider. Further, besides generating faces, this method can also ‘read’ faces, providing confidence estimates of perceptions of different social traits for any arbitrary image. And these confidence estimates can provide direct comparisons between images for their perceived psychological qualities including trustworthiness and attractiveness among others. This newly-developed method is both fast and accurate, and represents a paradigm shift in facial photo manipulation.
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Assistant Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology