Hearing someone say ‘I’m very bad for faces’ is something very common. In some cases, it is due to poor memory, but in others what happens is that the individual in question has not taken a good look at the faces. This is where there may be a problem, because, according to research, these people have a tendency to develop problematic personality traits.
The work has been carried out by psychologists from the universities of Bern (Switzerland), Freiburg (Switzerland) and Würzburg (Germany) and, according to their results, which have just been published in PLOS ONE, those people who are more inclined to pay attention to faces are more associated with positive traits of the ‘big five factor model’ of personality.
Also known as the ‘OCEAN model’, for the acronym in English of the variables that compose it, these are: open to risk (vs. cautious), conscientious (vs. careless), extrovert (vs. reserved), kind (vs. defiant) and neurotics (vs. self-confidence).
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Specifically, the participants who showed a greater predilection for looking at faces obtained higher scores in extroversion, kindness y empathywhile those who shunned them were at odds in the Big Five personality traits model.
incapacity for emotions
As a second part of the experiment they related this phenomenon to another interesting point. People given to not paying attention to faces were also prone to developing psychopathological facets, such as social anxiety, depression y alexithymiathat is, inability to feel, recognize and express emotions.
Psychopathological, although it shares roots, it is not necessarily associated with psychopathy. The problem is that alexithymia, together with low empathy, is a rather controversial attribute, since in psychological studies it has been related to the famous dark triadthose personality characteristics that, more or lesscould define a Bad person.
One of the pioneering works in linking both concepts was published in 2013 in the journal Personality and Individual Differences and, after analyzing 320 subjects, it concluded that low levels of empathy and a limited ability or motivation to communicate one’s own emotions foster a social strategy that favors the development of narcissism, machiavellianism y psychopathy: the attributes of the aforementioned triad.
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In the current study, the researchers asked 120 individuals to view a series of photographs. In them, several people appeared in different situations and environments, with the particularity that their faces were out of focus. There was the possibility of being able to blur the image to see the faces, but there were participants who decided not to. Curiously, all of them had been placed among the least desirable traits of the personality model and, in addition, they showed higher rates of psychopathological problems. Why didn’t they bother to look at people? What relationship do all these variables have?
different theories
The authors, for the moment, do not have an answer to this question, but they express their intrigue with the personality connections. One of the theories they put forward is the association between eye contact and social anxiety, something that has been pointed out by previous works. For example, in an investigation published in Comprehensive Psychiatryit was found that patients with generalized social anxiety disorder, compared with healthy controls, reported “significantly higher” levels of avoidance of social contact.
However, this explanation would not be sufficient for the authors. Firstly, because later works, such as one published by the British Psychological Societyhave shown that gaze avoidance as a characteristic of social anxiety is something that does occur in real life, but not in controlled environments in the laboratory, which is the responsibility of this investigation.
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In addition, as the researchers point out, the people in their experiment who were not paying attention to faces they did not stand out in a psychopathological problem specific, such as social anxiety, but they had high percentages in all of them.
violent offenders
Here the shadow of the Dark Triad returns, especially considering a 2020 investigation that analyzed eye contact in 30 violent criminals. Carried out by professionals from the University of Tübingen (Germany), they found that those who had obtained a high score in the assessment of psychopathy were more likely to dodge the investigator’s face. “The data reveal that greater affective psychopathy is a significant predictor of reduced visual contact”, sentences the work.
More concrete is the review titled The importance of gaze in the development of psychopathyin which the results of various works on the subject are collected and focuses the problem on a specific area of the face: the eyes.
According to the text, healthy babies show automatic attention to human faces, specifically to the fringe of the eyes. An early deficit in this automatic attention may imply a inhibition in the mechanisms of violence, since it postulates that the person would not develop emotion detection techniques such as fear in other people. Poetically speaking, he could never recognize the look of fear.