The face is the front of the head in humans and many other animals that features most of the sense organs including the eyes, nose and mouth. Many animals may express through their face.
The human face is crucial for identity, and damage such as scarring or developmental deformities may adversely affect the psyche.
Human face
Structure
The front of the
human head is called the face. It includes several distinct areas,
[ Face | Define Face at Dictionary.com. Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved on 2011-04-29.] of which the main features are:
Facial biometrics is vital for human recognition and communication. Facial muscles in humans allow expression of .
The face is itself a highly sense region of the human body and its expression may change when the Human brain is stimulated by any of the many human , such as touch, temperature, olfaction, taste, hearing, Vestibular sense, hunger, or visual stimuli.[ Anatomy of the Face and Head Underlying Facial Expression . Face-and-emotion.com. Retrieved on 2011-04-29.]
Variability
The face is the feature which best distinguishes a
person. Specialized regions of the
human brain, such as the fusiform face area (FFA), enable facial recognition; when these are
prosopagnosia, it may be impossible to recognize faces even of intimate family members. The pattern of specific organs, such as the eyes, or of parts of them, is used in biometric identification to uniquely identify individuals.
Shape
The shape of the face is influenced by the
bone of the skull, and each face is unique through the anatomical variation present in the bones of the
facial skeleton (and
neurocranium).
The bones involved in shaping the face are mainly the
maxilla,
mandible,
nasal bone,
zygomatic bone, and
frontal bone. Also important are various
, such as
adipose tissue,
hair and
Human skin (of which color may vary).
The face changes over time, and features common in children or infant, such as prominent buccal fat-pads disappear over time, their role in the infant is to stabilize the cheeks during suckling.
While the buccal fat-pads often diminish in size, the prominence of bones increase with age as they grow and develop.
Facial shape – such as facial symmetry – is an important determinant of human beauty.
Other characteristics
Visible variable features of the face other than shapes and proportions include color (paleness,
sun tan and
skin color), hair (length, color,
hair loss,
hair graying),
,
facial hair (e.g.
), skin sagging,
discolorations
(dark spots,
and eye circles
),
Sweat gland-variabilities,
skin blemishes (
,
,
burn). Many of these features can also vary over time due to
aging,
, nutrition,
the
exposome (such as harmful substances of the general environment,
workplace and cosmetics), psychological factors,
and behavior (such as smoking,
sleep,
physical activity and sun damage
).
Mechanisms underlying these include changes related to (notably collagen),
The desire of many to look young for their age and/or attractive
Genetics
Human genetics are a major factor in the particular appearance of a person's face with the high similarity of faces of
identical twins indicating that most of facial variability is determined genetically.
Studies have identified genes and gene regions determining face shape and differences in various facial features. A 2021 study found that a version of a gene associated with lip thickness – possibly selected for due to adaption to cold climate via fat distribution – introgressed from ancient humans – – into the modern humans Native Americans.[
]
-
University press release:
Biological databases may be used to aggregate and discover associations between facial and genes.
Function
Emotional expression
Faces are essential to expressing
emotion, consciously or unconsciously. A frown denotes disapproval; a smile usually means someone is pleased. Being able to read emotion in another's face is "the fundamental basis for empathy and the ability to interpret a person's reactions and predict the probability of ensuing behaviors". One study used the Multimodal Emotion Recognition Test
[ Multimodal Emotion Recognition Test (MERT) | Swiss Center for Affective Sciences . Affective-sciences.org. Retrieved on 2011-04-29.] to attempt to determine how to measure emotion. This research aimed at using a measuring device to accomplish what many people do every day: read emotion in a face.
The Facial muscles play a prominent role in the expression of emotion,
People are also relatively good at determining if a smile is real or fake. A recent study looked at individuals judging forced and genuine smiles. While young and elderly participants equally could tell the difference for smiling young people, the "older adult participants outperformed young adult participants in distinguishing between posed and spontaneous smiles".
Perception and recognition
Gestalt psychologists theorize that a face is not merely a set of facial features, but is rather something meaningful in its form. This is consistent with the Gestalt theory that an image is seen in its entirety, not by its individual parts. According to Gary L. Allen, people adapted to respond more to faces during evolution as the natural result of being a social species. Allen suggests that the purpose of recognizing faces has its roots in the "parent-infant attraction, a quick and low-effort means by which parents and infants form an internal representation of each other, reducing the likelihood that the parent will abandon his or her offspring because of recognition failure".
Allen's work takes a psychological perspective that combines evolutionary theories with Gestalt psychology.
Biological perspective
Research has indicated that certain areas of the brain respond particularly well to faces. The fusiform face area, within the
fusiform gyrus, is activated by faces, and it is activated differently for
Shyness and social people. A study confirmed that "when viewing images of strangers, shy adults exhibited significantly less activation in the fusiform gyri than did social adults".
Furthermore, particular areas respond more to a face that is considered attractive, as seen in another study: "Facial beauty evokes a widely distributed neural network involving perceptual, decision-making and reward circuits. In those experiments, the perceptual response across FFA and LOC lateral remained present even when subjects were not attending explicitly to facial beauty".
Society and culture
Cosmetic surgery
Cosmetic surgery can be used to alter the appearance of the facial features.
[ Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery: MedlinePlus. Nlm.nih.gov. Retrieved on 2011-04-29.] Maxillofacial surgery may also be used in cases of
facial trauma, injury to the face and skin diseases. Severely disfigured individuals have received full
and partial transplants of skin and muscle tissue.
[ Face Transplant Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital]
Caricatures
often exaggerate facial features to make a face more easily recognized in association with a pronounced portion of the face of the individual in question—for example, a caricature of Osama bin Laden might focus on his facial hair and nose; a caricature of George W. Bush might enlarge his ears to the size of an elephant's; a caricature of
Jay Leno may pronounce his head and chin; and a caricature of
Mick Jagger might enlarge his lips. Exaggeration of memorable features helps people to recognize others when presented in a caricature form.
[ information about caricatures . Edu.dudley.gov.uk. Retrieved on 2011-04-29.]
Metaphor
By extension, anything which is the forward or world-facing part of a system which has internal structure is considered its "face", like the façade of a building. For example, a public relations or
press officer might be called the "face" of the organization he or she represents. "Face" is also used metaphorically in a sociological context to refer to reputation or standing in society, particularly Chinese society,
[: "The concept of face is, of course, Chinese in origin".] and is spoken of as a resource which can be won or lost. Because of the association with individuality, the anonymous person is sometimes referred to as "faceless".
Other animals
The
cephalic index is used to classify the shapes of the
skull that determines the shape of the face of many animals. In particular the index is used in cat and dog breeding, and in farming. The shaping of the skull can result in the flat-faced appearance known in brachycephalic animals.
See also
