The many faces of a neutral face: Head tilt and perception of dominance and emotion

ABSTRACT: Based on the premise that human head tilt is homologous to animal dominance displays, we hypothesized that when a head is bowed, the face should be perceived as submissive, sad, displaying inferiority emotions (i.e., shame, embar-rassment, guilt, humiliation, and respect) and, paradoxically, as contracting the zy-gomatic major muscle. Conversely, a raised head should be perceived as more dominant and displaying greater superiority emotions (i.e., contempt and pride). We conducted two experiments showing 3-D models of faces to 64 participants. The results confirmed our hypotheses and also showed that a raised head connotes happiness. In addition, we found a significant influence of the actors ’ sex on partici-pants ’ perception, such as a bias towards perceiving stronger upward contraction of the mouth in female than male actors when the head is tilted. We discuss these findings within the context of evolution and social behavior. KEY WORDS: dominance; facial emotion displays; head angle; sex; smile. Social animals often have dominance hierarchies. Within a hierarchy, animals perform dominance and submission (or appeasement) displays. The hypothesized functions of these dominance relationships are to mini-mize conflicts and increase social cohesion. Whereas an appeasement dis-play represents recognition of a dominance relationship, a dominance display, on the other hand, may be impressive enough to dissuade a chal-lenger from attacking (Preuschoft & van Schaik, 2000). Furthermore, domi-nance displays can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy by reinforcing dominant status, which in turn leads to priority in access to resources (Tiedens, 2000). Resource priority, of course, has a significant impact on the chances of surviving and mating. The efficacy of a dominance/appeasement displa