Two Faced: Your left face is the angry one.

Monday, July 28th 2008. (Originally from Facebook notes)

I went to the Cleveland Ingenuity Festival this past Sunday. Although the event was geared more for kids, I still enjoyed thinking about the science behind the exhibits on my own. There were a few exhibits that I really enjoyed. I'm going to share one of them:

Facial Asymmetry. The more symmetric the face is, the more attractive it is. Celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Cate Blanchett have very high symmetry in their faces. You can even check out your own symmetry percentage here: http://www.symmeter.com/ (I haven't tried it -- don't have a perfectly frontal picture of myself).

There was an exhibit displaying eight photographs of different faces; each face had three images. One image was of the person as-is, the second image was a composite of the mirror image of the Right side of the face with itself, and the third image was a composite of the mirror image of the Left side of the face with itself. Most of the faces were asymmetric to begin with so the Left composite and the Right composite looked pretty different from each other.

What was interesting was that the Left composite always looked smiling or angry or sad. All the Right composites looked detached, indifferent, or even dead and zombie-like. It turns out that human emotions are expressed more intensely on the left side of the face.

I thought that was cool. I noticed that in myself too -- I look more expressive whenever someone photographs me from the left side. Even my eyebrows are arched more on my left side...

I wished I could have photographed the exhibit so you have something to look at. Oh well, here is a paper you can look at and you can search for others if you want. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/202/4366/434

Two-faced from Batman, the movie.