Richard Russell - Research

Perceiving age, health, sex, and beauty in the face

The physical anthropology community has shown that male skin is darker than female skin (e.g. the work of Peter Frost). I have shown that while male skin is darker than female skin, male eyes and lips are not much darker than female eyes and lips. The result is greater contrast in female faces between the eyes, mouth and the rest of the face. People use this sex difference in facial contrast to decide the sex of a face and how masculine or feminine it is. Manipulating this facial contrast has opposite effects on male and female attractiveness. Interestingly, cosmetics exaggerate this sex difference, which suggests that cosmetics are used to manipulate sex differences to make the female face more feminine, and hence attractive. Recent work in my lab has shown that aspects of facial contrast also decrease with age.

Russell, R., Sweda, J.R., Porcheron, A., & Mauger, E. (In press) Sclera Color Changes With Age and is a Cue for Perceiving Age, Health, and Beauty. Psychology and Aging

Porcheron, A., Mauger, E., & Russell, R. (2013) Aspects of facial contrast decrease with age and are cues for age perception.PLOS ONE 8(3): e57985.

Russell, R. (2012) Cosmetics use: psychological perspectives. In Cash, T. (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Body Image and Human Appearance Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Russell, R. (2010) Why cosmetics work. In Adams, R., Ambady, N., Nakayama, K., & Shimojo, S. (Eds.) The Science of Social Vision. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 186-203

Russell, R. (2009) A sex difference in facial pigmentation and its exaggeration by cosmetics. Perception, (38)1211-1219.

Russell, R. (2003) Sex, beauty, and the relative luminance of facial features. Perception, (32) 1093-1107.

Face Recognition: Prosopagnosia and Super-Recognizers

Prosopagnosia (also called face blindness) is an impairment in the recognition of faces. More information about prosopagnosia can be found at www.faceblind.org. Some people are the opposite of prosopagnosic, and have excellent face recognition ability. I have named these people "super-recognizers".

Russell, R., Chatterjee, G., & Nakayama, K. (2012) Developmental prosopagnosia and super-recognition: no special role for surface reflectance processing. Neuropsychologia, (50)334-340

Russell, R., Duchaine, B., & Nakayama, K. (2009) Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16(2), 252-257.

The BBC World Service did an excellent piece on super-recognizers. The segment on super-recognizers runs from minute 13:07 to 22:29.

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?

I am interested in the effects of social organization, experience, and learning on attractiveness preferences.

Chen, H., Russell, R., Nakayama, K., & Livingstone, M. (2010) Crossing the "Uncanny Valley": adaptation to cartoon faces can influence perception of human faces. Perception, (39)378-386.

Bronstad, P. M., Langlois, J.H. & Russell, R. (2008) Computational models of facial attractiveness judgments. Perception, (37)126-142.

Bronstad, P. M. & Russell, R. (2007) Beauty is in the "we" of the beholder: Greater agreement on facial attractiveness among close relations. Perception, (36)1674-1681.

Representations for Face Recognition

It is commonly assumed that shape is the dominant feature for face recognition, as is the case for most object classes. However, research that I have conducted with Ken Nakayama at Harvard, Pawan Sinha at MIT and Irving Biederman at the University of Southern California, and work by others (especially Alice O'Toole), has shown that surface reflectance and shape are in fact about equally important for face recognition.

Russell, R., Chatterjee, G., & Nakayama, K. (2012) Developmental prosopagnosia and super-recognition: no special role for surface reflectance processing. Neuropsychologia, (50)334-340

Russell, R. & Sinha, P. (2007) Real world face recognition: The importance of surface reflectance properties. Perception, (36)1368-1374.

Russell, R., Biederman, I., Nederhouser, M., & Sinha, P. (2007) The utility of surface reflectance for the recognition of upright and inverted faces. Vision Research, (47) 157-165.

Sinha, P., Balas, B. J., Ostrovsky, Y., & Russell, R. (2006) Face recognition by humans: 19 results all computer vision researchers should know about. Proceedings of the IEEE, 94(11) 1948-1962.

Russell, R., Sinha, P., Biederman, I., & Nederhouser, M. (2006) Is pigmentation important for face recognition? Evidence from contrast negation. Perception, (35) 749-759.