Within seconds of meeting a new person, whether on a date or in a store, we make a lot of inferences about them, including how smart the person seemed to us, and even how capable they were of crime. Surprisingly, our first impression can be very accurate in some cases. In other cases, we are deeply mistaken. Here are eleven characteristics that we evaluate in people based on how they look ...
If you are attractive, people think that you have other positive qualities
Thanks to a phenomenon that social psychologists call the “halo effect,” we tend to assume that attractive people have other positive qualities besides appearance, including intelligence and responsibility. Daniel Hamermesh, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin who studies beauty in the workplace, has found that, among other things, this cognitive bias means that attractive people tend to be paid more.
Similar data were shown by a study conducted among male students of the last courses. They were asked to rate an essay written by an unnamed classmate. Participants rated the author and her work more favorably when they were shown a photo of an attractive girl who was passed off as the author of the essay than when they were shown a picture of an ugly girl or no photo at all.
People can suddenly understand a lot about your personality from a photo.
People can tell a lot about you unexpectedly from your portrait. In a 2009 study, researchers showed participants photographs of 123 graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, in which they either had to put on a neutral facial expression or were allowed to pose as they pleased.
Regardless of how the person posed, those who judged the photographs were strikingly accurate in determining the degree of openness of the person in the photograph, the state of his self-esteem, the degree of religiosity, complaisance and conscientiousness.
People use facial features that indicate height as a clue to your leadership qualities.
In 2013, a group of psychologists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists from Europe and the United States asked a small group of subjects to look at portraits of 47 white men and 83 white women and rate first their height and then their leadership abilities.
The researchers found that people looked at factors such as gender and face length to make guesses about a person's height, and then used those same traits when making judgments about leadership qualities. Persons who allegedly belonged to higher people were classified as people with better leadership abilities.
The structure of your face can indicate to others how aggressive you are.
A small recent study by researchers at the Center for Behavior Change at University College London suggests that men with higher testosterone levels are more likely to have broader faces and larger cheekbones. Men with these facial features also tend to have a more aggressive or status dependent personality.
People pay attention to the structure of your face to judge how physically strong you are.
In a 2015 study, scientists showed subjects pictures of 10 different people with five different facial expressions, and then asked to rate how friendly, trustworthy, or strong the people in the photographs seemed to them.
The participants, unsurprisingly, were more likely to rate people with a happy expression as friendlier and more trustworthy. In addition, subjects tended to rate people with broad faces as stronger.
If you look "suspicious", you are more likely to be considered a criminal
It is not known why some people seem more trustworthy than others, but this quality can be life-changing. Scientists from Israel and the UK asked participants to look at photographs of men and women randomly selected from a database and rate their emotional state, personality traits, and the likelihood that the person in the photograph was a criminal.
The first part of the shots was taken from a database of police photographs taken at the time of the arrests, and the second part was staged shots in which the actors portrayed joy, a neutral expression or anger.
Regardless of which base the photo came from, people who were rated as less trustworthy and more dominant were also most often rated as criminals. In staged photographs, actors with an evil expression on their faces were called the most criminal.
How people perceive your face can be a matter of life and death
A pair of psychologists from the University of Toronto recently collected photos of real prisoners who received prison sentences for aggravated murder for the sake of research. About half of them received life sentences, the other half were on death row.
The researchers then asked a group of participants to look at the photographs and rate how trustworthy those faces were on a scale of one to eight. Among those portraits that the subjects rated as the least credible, there were more death row inmates than among those who were considered more credible.
In the second part of the experiment, participants looked at photographs of people who had previously been convicted of murder but then acquitted, usually based on DNA tests. Scary, those who were sentenced to death but later acquitted were also rated as the least trustworthy.
If you do not take into account cognitive distortions, your appearance can tell about the state of your health. For example, wrinkles can indicate heart problems.
Wrinkled skin isn't just about age: it's also about the state of your heart. A 2012 study compared the number of wrinkles on the faces and inside of the arms in 261 people with centenarian parents and in a randomly selected group of 253 people of the same age of the same age.
Women with the lowest risk of heart disease, according to those surveyed, looked more than two years younger than those with the highest risk of heart disease.
Other health problems are seen primarily in the eyes
Doctors can diagnose a number of diseases just by looking into your eyes. Red spots on the retina can be a sign of diabetes. When blood sugar levels get too high, blood vessels in the retina clog, swell and rupture.
It's not just your face that tells you. In men, the length of the fingers is associated with the degree of susceptibility to cancer
Researchers studied finger length in 1,500 prostate cancer patients and 3,000 healthy men for 15 years. The researchers asked subjects to look at photographs of hands and choose the ones they thought most resembled their own hands.
Men who said their index fingers were the same or longer than their ring fingers were one third more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer over the course of the study than those men who had comparably shorter index fingers. This result was more pronounced among men under 60 years of age.
It is worth noting that the study was based on visual perception of finger length and not on objective measurements, so the results can only be confirmed by further studies.
Your height can tell you your risk for certain diseases
According to studies, taller people have a lower risk of heart disease, and shorter people are less prone to cancer. It is believed that this is due to the amount of growth hormone produced, which is able to protect against certain diseases, but at the same time increase the risk of other diseases.
However, these research results do not necessarily mean that being high or low means being one hundred percent protected from any disease.
It can be assumed that the great philosophers looked through the appearance of a person directly into his soul, but the ancient Greek thinkers, on the contrary, were very interested in the appearance of those around them. Aristotle and his followers even compiled a whole list of signs with the help of which it is easy to see how our appearance reflects the state of our spirit: for example, soft hair indicates cowardice, coarse hair indicates courage, they believed.
ABOUT insolence, as written in that treatise, says "bright open eyes with heavy bloodshot eyelids." And a wide nose, both in humans and in cattle, was a sign laziness. Sensual fleshy lips are not too lucky either. Philosophers considered them a sign nonsense, "like a donkey", but those who had very thin lips were considered proud like lions.
Today we are taught not to judge a book by its cover. However, psychologists have discovered that our face is like a window through which our deepest secrets can be seen. Even if you keep a straight face, some of its features can convey a lot of information about your personality, health and intelligence level.
Aggressive facial structure
“The idea is that our biology, genes and hormone levels influence our development. The same mechanisms will shape our character,” explains Carmen Lefèvre of Northumbria University.
After analyzing the structure of the facial bones, Lefevre found that people with high testosterone levels tend to have massive cheekbones, and their character is assertive, and sometimes aggressive.
Relationship between face shape and dominant behavior very common, as among animals - the wider the face of a capuchin monkey, the more likely it is to occupy a higher position in the hierarchy of the group - and among professional football players.
After studying the 2010 FIFA World Cup, Kate Welker of the University of Boulder in Colorado found that the ratio of the width and height of the faces of football players affects both the number of fouls among linebackers and the number of goals scored by forwards.
To calculate this ratio yourself, simply compare the distance from ear to ear with the distance from the point between the eyes to the upper lip. The average width-to-height ratio is two. And Abraham Lincoln, for example, it was 1.93.
Perhaps this ratio is the key to the motives of the actions of this politician.
Lefèvre used volunteers by asking them to evaluate some psychological parameters. former presidents USA. As a result, she found that the shape of the face seems to reflect the ambitions of these people. Of course, such an analysis of historical figures should be taken with a certain amount of skepticism, since other characteristics, such as intelligence and the ability to cooperate, are also important for success.
Plump cheeks
As expected, your state of health and your medical history are also recorded on your face. And they are remarkably detailed. For example, the amount of fat on your face is a more reliable indicator of your fitness than your body mass index.
People with thinner faces suffer less from infections, and if they do get sick, the disease is not too severe. More such people lower levels of anxiety and depression- probably because the mental state is often associated with the general physical form of a person.
Why does the fullness of the cheeks say so much about you? Benedict Jones of the University of Glasgow believes that a new understanding of the role of fat in our body can answer this question. "It's not just how much fat you have that tells you how healthy you are, but where that fat is," he says.
pear shaped people which excess weight concentrated in the hips, but at the same time having a slender torso, as a rule, there are healthier people in which fat accumulates on the abdomen and sides. It is believed that adipose tissue in this area releases special molecules that provoke inflammation of the internal organs.
“Perhaps the fullness of our face reflects fat deposits in the most dangerous places of the body,” says Jones, “or it may turn out that fat on the face is dangerous in itself for some reason.”
In addition to these, quite obvious, signs, very subtle signs can also tell a lot about health. differences in skin color. Lefèvre and Jones emphasize that this has nothing to do with a person's ethnicity, but subtle nuances that reflect differences in people's lifestyles.
Your health is better if the skin has slightly yellowish, almost golden hue. The pigments we are talking about now are called carotenoids, and, as the name suggests, they can be found in red and orange vegetables and fruits.
“Carotenoids help us build a healthy immune system,” says Lefevre. - But when we eat too much of them, they are deposited in the skin, making it slightly yellowish. This 'healthy glow', in turn, contributes significantly to our physical attractiveness."
A pink skin tone speaks of good blood circulation, which comes with an active lifestyle. In addition, in women, it may be a sign of good fertility. Jones found that women's skin turns slightly redder at the peak of their menstrual cycle. Perhaps this is because under the influence of estradiol, a sex hormone, the blood vessels in the cheeks dilate slightly.
smart view
As Jones points out, all these secrets were always in plain sight. We were just in no hurry to reveal them. At the very least, this knowledge helps to restore the reputation of physiognomy, which began to lose popularity already in the time of Aristotle.
And King Henry VIII Tudor was so skeptical about physiognomy that at one time he even forbade “charlatan” professors from this science to make a profit for reading their lectures. Now the confidence in this discipline is growing again, so we can find many more surprises lurking in our selfies.
The interesting thing is that we seem to already be able to get an idea of a person's intelligence by looking at his face, however is still unclear what are the characteristics that make a person seem smart. And, of course, everything is much more complicated here than the presence or absence of points.
We can also determine a person's sexual orientation in a fraction of a second, even without any stereotypical clues. But how we do it is still a mystery.
Perhaps further research will be able to explain exactly how we make such quick judgments.
It will also be interesting to know if there is a link between personality characteristics, lifestyle, physical appearance and life expectancy.
One experiment investigated the relationship between personality traits and physical appearance. The experiment ran from 1930 to 1990. The researchers found that although men with childlike features were not particularly dominant at a young age, they became more assertive with age. Perhaps because they have learned to compensate for the expectations associated with their "puppy" faces.
If women from a young age until the age of thirty were sociable and attractive, then after the age of thirty their physical attractiveness increased even more, so that at 50 they could look even better compared to young women.
Perhaps these women simply knew how to get the most out of their appearance and their inner confidence showed through in their facial features.
And finally, there is something more significant in our appearance than the bone structure of the face and skin tone. This fact was clearly demonstrated by another recent study.
The experts asked the subjects to put on their favorite clothes, and then take a picture of their face. Despite the fact that the clothes in the resulting photographs were not visible, impartial judges noted that these photos were much more attractive compared to other photographs of the subjects. This discovery becomes even more striking when you consider the fact that the subjects were asked to maintain a blank expression during the experiment. And despite this, the increased self-esteem of the subjects literally shone through this impassivity.
Our faces are not just a product of our biology. We cannot change our hormones or our genes. But as our personality and sense of self-worth develops, our faces begin to reflect something more important.
Everyone judges others. Within the first few seconds of meeting a new person, whether on a date
We meet by clothes: what can tell about a person his appearance
07:45 May 25, 2017Everyone judges others. Within the first few seconds of meeting a new person, whether on a date or in a store, we make many judgments about them, including how smart the person seemed to us, and even how capable they were of crime.
Surprisingly, our first impression can be very accurate in some cases. In other cases, we are deeply mistaken. Here are eleven characteristics that we evaluate in people based on how they look.
If you are attractive, people will think that you have other positive qualities.
Thanks to a phenomenon that social psychologists call the “halo effect,” we tend to assume that attractive people have other positive qualities besides appearance, including intelligence and responsibility. Daniel Hamermesh, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin who studies beauty in the workplace, has found that, among other things, this cognitive bias means that attractive people tend to be paid more.Similar data were shown by a study conducted among male students of the last courses. They were asked to rate an essay written by an unnamed classmate. Participants rated the author and her work more favorably when they were shown a photo of an attractive girl who was passed off as the author of the essay than when they were shown a picture of an ugly girl or no photo at all.
People can suddenly understand a lot about your personality from a photo.
People can tell a lot about you unexpectedly from your portrait. In a 2009 study, researchers showed participants photographs of 123 graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, in which they either had to put on a neutral facial expression or were allowed to pose as they pleased. Regardless of how the person posed, those who judged the photographs were strikingly accurate in determining the degree of openness of the person in the photograph, the state of his self-esteem, the degree of religiosity, complaisance and conscientiousness.
People use facial features that indicate height as a clue to your leadership qualities.
In 2013, a group of psychologists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists from Europe and the United States asked a small group of subjects to look at portraits of 47 white men and 83 white women and rate first their height and then their leadership abilities. The researchers found that people looked at factors such as gender and face length to make guesses about a person's height, and then used those same traits when making judgments about leadership qualities. Persons who allegedly belonged to higher people were classified as people with better leadership abilities.
The structure of your face can indicate to others how aggressive you are.
A small recent study by researchers at the Center for Behavior Change at University College London suggests that men with higher testosterone levels are more likely to have broader faces and larger cheekbones. Men with these facial features also tend to have a more aggressive or status dependent personality.
People pay attention to the structure of your face to judge how physically strong you are.
In a 2015 study, researchers showed subjects pictures of 10 different people with five different facial expressions and then asked them to rate how friendly, trustworthy, or strong the people in the pictures seemed to them. The participants, unsurprisingly, were more likely to rate people with a happy expression as friendlier and more trustworthy. In addition, subjects tended to rate people with broad faces as stronger.
If you look "suspicious", you are more likely to be considered a criminal
It is not known why some people seem more trustworthy than others, but this quality can be life-changing. Scientists from Israel and the UK asked participants to look at photographs of men and women randomly selected from a database and rate their emotional state, personality traits, and the likelihood that the person in the photograph was a criminal. The first part of the shots was taken from a database of police photographs taken at the time of the arrests, and the second part was staged shots in which the actors portrayed joy, a neutral expression or anger.Regardless of which base the photo came from, people who were rated as less trustworthy and more dominant were also most often rated as criminals. In staged photographs, actors with an evil expression on their faces were called the most criminal.
How people perceive your face can be a matter of life and death
A pair of psychologists from the University of Toronto recently collected photos of real prisoners who received prison sentences for aggravated murder for the sake of research. About half of them received life sentences, the other half were on death row.The researchers then asked a group of participants to look at the photographs and rate how trustworthy those faces were on a scale of one to eight. Among those portraits that the subjects rated as the least credible, there were more death row inmates than among those who were considered more credible. In the second part of the experiment, participants looked at photographs of people who had previously been convicted of murder but then acquitted, usually based on DNA tests. Scary, those who were sentenced to death but later acquitted were also rated as the least trustworthy.
If you do not take into account cognitive distortions, your appearance can tell about the state of your health. For example, wrinkles can indicate heart problems.
Wrinkled skin isn't just about age: it's also about the state of your heart. A 2012 study compared the number of wrinkles on the faces and inside of the arms in 261 people with centenarian parents and in a randomly selected group of 253 people of the same age of the same age. Women with the lowest risk of heart disease, according to those surveyed, looked more than two years younger than those with the highest risk of heart disease.
Other health problems are seen primarily in the eyes
Doctors can diagnose a number of diseases just by looking into your eyes. Red spots on the retina can be a sign of diabetes. When blood sugar levels get too high, the blood vessels in the retina clog, swell, and rupture.
It's not just your face that tells you. In men, the length of the fingers is associated with the degree of susceptibility to cancer
Researchers studied finger length in 1,500 prostate cancer patients and 3,000 healthy men for 15 years. The researchers asked subjects to look at photographs of hands and choose the ones they thought most resembled their own hands. Men who said their index fingers were the same or longer than their ring fingers were one third more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer over the course of the study than those men who had comparably shorter index fingers. This result was more pronounced among men under 60 years of age. It is worth noting that the study was based on visual perception of finger length and not on objective measurements, so the results can only be confirmed by further studies.
Your height can tell you your risk for certain diseases
According to studies, taller people have a lower risk of heart disease, and shorter people are less prone to cancer. It is believed that this is due to the amount of growth hormone produced, which is able to protect against certain diseases, but at the same time increase the risk of other diseases. However, these research results do not necessarily mean that being high or low means being one hundred percent protected from any disease.If people differ in the goals of life, in the inner content of life, then this difference will certainly be reflected in appearance, and the appearance will be different.
L. N. Tolstoy
“Holmes took the hat in his hands and began to examine it intently with a penetrating look peculiar to him alone.
“Of course, not everything is clear enough,” he remarked, “but some things can be established for sure, and some things can be assumed with a reasonable degree of probability. It is quite obvious, for example, that its owner is a man of great intelligence ...
“I must confess that I am unable to follow your train of thought. For example, where did you get the idea that he is smart?
Instead of answering, Holmes put his hat on his head. The hat covered the forehead and rested on the bridge of the nose.
- Look at the size! - he said. “Such a large skull cannot be completely empty” (A. Conan Doyle. “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”).
Was the great detective right in his reasoning? Indeed, human thinking is the result of the work of the brain. But is it true that large size head (and hence the brain) - evidence of a great mind?
It has been established that the average weight of the human brain is about one and a half kilograms. The researchers were able to estimate the size of the brain of many people, including prominent ones. It turned out that the writer I. A. Turgenev and the English poet George Byron had a very large brain - about 2 kg, but the philosopher Immanuel Kant and the writer Anatole France - almost two times less. But no one would have dared to say that Anatole France was twice as stupid as George Byron (and Holmes hardly believed that he was inferior in intelligence to the unknown owner of the hat). Moreover, it turned out that the largest of the studied brain samples belonged to a mentally retarded person. Therefore, do not rush to measure your head. So you can only set the size of the cap, but not at all mental abilities.
Describing a case of exceptional psychological insight of a great detective, English writer paid tribute to common worldly delusion. But does this mean that any conclusion about the character of a person, drawn from observations of his appearance, is just as unfounded and erroneous? Indeed, a subtle psychological instinct is rare, and even its owners are not immune from mistakes. Nevertheless, there are examples of a strikingly acute ability to evaluate people. One such example served as a source of inspiration for Conan Doyle. As you know, the prototype of the great detective was the university teacher Conan Doyle - the chief surgeon of the Royal Hospital in Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell. Professor Bell was widely known for his sensational experiments: he could make an accurate diagnosis just by looking at the patient, as a rule, without resorting to a questionnaire, the completion of which was the responsibility of the student Conan Doyle, who assisted during the sessions. Having determined the disease almost unmistakably, the professor, among other things, informed those present where the patient worked, what he was fond of, what he had experienced in the past. He was distinguished by rare observation and could only appearance, clothes, gestures, facial expression of the patient to get a complete picture of his former life. The professor's guesses seemed sensational, but as soon as he explained the course of his reasoning, everything seemed surprisingly simple. Here he is examining a patient in the presence of students: “We have a fisherman in front of us, gentlemen! This can be seen at once, considering that even on such a hot day the patient wears high boots. The tan on his face suggests that he is a coastal sailor and not a deep sea sailor. This tan obviously arose in one climate, a local tan, so to speak. Chewing tobacco, beloved by sailors, is in his cheek, and he handles it with great confidence. The set of all these conclusions allows us to consider that this person is a fisherman. And, finally, a specific smell makes it possible to judge his occupation with particular certainty.
Thus, the totality of external features can serve as a valuable diagnostic and, above all, psychodiagnostic material. Since ancient times, attempts have even been made to create an appropriate theory. Unfortunately, almost all of these attempts proved unproductive. Any theory limited the perception of a person to rigid (albeit insufficiently tested) frameworks and, in each specific case, did not insure against unacceptable exaggerations.
Attempts to determine the relationship between the appearance and character of a person were made by Aristotle, who is one of the creators of the doctrine of physiognomy. Predicting by external signs the behavioral reactions of a person and the features of his intellect, Aristotle great importance gave it a resemblance to animals, which, according to tradition, were endowed with qualities allegedly inherent in them. “A nose as thick as a bull’s,” wrote Aristotle, “means laziness. A wide nose with large nostrils, like a pig's, is nonsense. A sharp nose, like a dog's, is a sign of a choleric temperament. An aquiline nose means courage, hooked like a crow's - alertness ... whoever has a wide mouth is brave.
Aristotle also believed that it was possible to establish similarities between an individual and representatives of entire races and nationalities - Ethiopians, Indians, Hittites, etc. Having analyzed the signs of different peoples (what we would call today national character), it is not difficult to determine the individual character by the severity of the corresponding external features.
Aristotle also owns an observation that is more like the truth: if a person’s face carries features characteristic of the manifestation of certain emotional states(peace, fear, passion), then it can be argued without the risk of falling into error that it is this state that is so characteristic of a person that it is actually his individual feature. That is, a person whose face constantly resembles a mask of fear is timid by nature, etc.
Taking the teachings of Aristotle as a basis, his followers began to develop physiognomy. Of these, Polemon (II century AD) and Adamantius (IV century AD) are the most famous.
However, according to some historians, before Aristotle, Pythagoras was engaged in physiognomy, whom some scientists consider to be its ancestor. Consistent conductors of physiognomy were prominent scientists Ancient Greece And ancient rome: outstanding doctors Quintillian, Gehlen and Celsus; great thinkers Cicero, Pliny Jr., etc.
Qiyafa was very popular in the Ancient East - the art of the Bedouins, who can read, like an open book, not only the secrets of the desert, but also the secrets of the human face. So, a man, similar in appearance to a lion, was declared brave, merciful, proud and patient; like a leopard - boastful, vindictive and treacherous. A high forehead in the view of the Bedouins testified to stupidity (!), Receding hairline - to the baseness of the spirit, a narrow forehead - to dexterity. Eyes of medium size spoke of a fair mind and good character, a fixed gaze - of dullness, an absent-minded gaze - of windiness and inconstancy. The Bedouins attached great importance to moles. In the Middle Ages, rich Arabs inclined towards "science" chose slaves on the market, relying on these and many other physiognomic principles.
Discussing the true and false essence of physiognomy, the religious teacher 'Abdu'l-Bahá cites a curious parable about a young physiognomist who diligently studied the science of facial features and expressions in Egypt for six years. Having successfully passed the exams and saddled a horse, joyful and proud, the young man returned to his homeland. The knowledge gained allowed him to see in everyone he met obvious and hidden character traits, good and bad inclinations. He was especially struck by the face of one stranger, in which he read that he was greedy, cunning and merciless. The young physiognomist was amazed when the stranger with a good-natured smile began to kindly invite him into the house as an honored guest. The inconsistency of what he learned and saw not only excited the young man, but also aroused in him doubts about the fidelity of the Egyptian school of physiognomists. For three days, the hospitable host exquisitely delighted the learned guest with all kinds of dishes and a hookah. However, when parting, the host's face again acquired an evil expression, and the bill unexpectedly handed over to the "guest of honor" turned out to be unimaginably high. I had to give all the money, a bathrobe and a horse to boot. Cleaned to the bone, the young physiognomist set off on his journey... praising the Almighty and his teachers for the fact that the years of study in the Egyptian school were not wasted.
In the Middle Ages, individual views of physiognomists were shared and to some extent improved by Ibn Sina and a number of leading alchemists, in the Renaissance, by John Duns Scott and Leonardo da Vinci.
Since the 15th century, physiognomy has gained great popularity. It was seriously dealt with by all those who "on duty" were busy "working with people" - clerics, doctors, philosophers, lawyers. Considerable popularity has gained, in particular, face-telling: determining the fate of a person by facial features. Physiognomy at that time was quite authoritative. By that time, she had managed to acquire many new conclusions, which, in terms of reliability, could well compete with Aristotle's maxims. So, the medieval monk Albert the Great believed that “a thick and long nose is a sign of a person who loves everything beautiful, and not as smart as he thinks of himself,” and “whoever turns his head in all directions is a complete fool, a fool, a vain deceitful rogue, preoccupied with himself, of mediocre abilities, a depraved mind, quite generous and finds great pleasure in inventing and asserting political news.
At the end of the 18th century, such formal physiognomy was developed in a multi-volume work by the Zurich pastor Johann Lavater, who first studied the psychological characteristics of a person (partly using the confessions of parishioners at confession), and then compared the data obtained with the features of facial features. The information accumulated in this way served as a pretext for the fact that he began to prove the possibility of determining character traits from the relief of the face and the structure of the skull and to claim the role of the founder of a new science. He wrote: "Faces are as readable as books are, the only difference is that they are read in a short time and deceive us less." However, not everyone shared his enthusiasm. Giving an assessment of Lavater's teachings, Georg Lichtenberg noted that “this theory represents in psychology the same as a very well-known theory in physics, explaining the light of the northern lights by the brilliance of herring scales ... You can try to draw yourself a night watchman by voice. At the same time, you will often be so mistaken that it is difficult not to laugh when you discover your error. Is physiognomy something else?
Having made a splash with the originality of his approach, Lavater made a number of mistakes that are unthinkable for a serious researcher. So, the subject of his observations was not all facial features in their interaction, but mainly its lower part and the so-called facial profile. A systematic method was not derived, objective patterns were replaced by the subjective opinion of the author, and as a result, Lavater's works caused serious criticism.
The Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall, who created his own interesting theory, shared Lavater's views to a fair extent. As a boy, he noticed that those of his schoolmates who are distinguished by large and bulging eyes, in addition to this obvious feature, also have a very good memory for words. Subsequently, pondering this observation, Gall came to the conclusion that the part of the brain located behind the eye orbits is responsible for this type of memory. Distinguishing between the memory of things, places, names, numbers, verbal and grammatical memory, Gall located the forms of memory allocated by him in separate "organs" of the brain. Among the abilities localized in the cerebral cortex, he also included courage, ambition, sociability, love for parents, the instinct of procreation, etc.
Gall and his students created detailed maps brain, where they indicated the localization of the moral and intellectual qualities of a person. Since everything: mind, expansiveness, tenderness and even love are controlled by strictly defined areas of the brain, their increase, indicating the severity of this quality, is accompanied by the appearance of a bulge in the corresponding place on the skull. If there is no bulge in the right place, it means that God did not reward the person with this ability. It turned out very convenient: touched the skull - and the person in front of you is literally in full view.
From such observations, a whole doctrine took shape, which entered the history of science under the name "phrenology" (from the Greek phren - mind). Interestingly, Gall himself did not recognize this term. “I am called the father of a new science - phrenology. But it's not. The word "phrenology" was introduced by my student Spurzheim. I am against this term and use the terms "cephaloscopy", "cranioscopy", "craniology".
Gall's theory quickly gained popularity, including in our country. Head physician P. Puzino, who participated in foreign campaigns in 1813-1814. and listened to Gall's lectures in Paris, translated his works into Russian. In 1816, the book "Investigations on the nervous system in general and on the brain in particular, of Messrs. Gall and Spurzheim" was published in St. Petersburg. But the materialistic spirit of the new doctrine was not to everyone's taste. When in 1824 the medical scientist D.M. Vellansky expressed a desire to give public lectures on "Gallic cranioscopy", he was not allowed to do this, explaining the refusal by the fact that it was "disgusting to the Christian religion." But phrenological ideas spontaneously spread and embraced many enlightened minds. Let us recall, for example, "a small plaster head, broken into numbered quadrangles" in Father Bazarov's office from Fathers and Sons. And this is understandable: after all, Bazarov Sr. was a district doctor. However, Gall's teaching was also popular among people far from medicine. So, M. Yu. Lermontov, describing Dr. Werner on behalf of Pechorin, remarks among other things: “He cut his hair with a comb, and the irregularities of his skull, exposed in this way, would have struck a phrenologist with a strange interweaving of opposite inclinations.” The Gall system was also taken seriously by people from Pushkin's inner circle. A friend of the poet I. I. Pushchin, later recalling the lyceum life, and in particular the lyceum uncle Sazonov, wrote about him that it was “an extraordinary physiological phenomenon; Gall would undoubtedly find confirmation of his system in his skull. References to Gall's ideas are also found in Pushkin himself. The earliest of them is in a letter to Anna Kern dated 1825. Half-seriously, half-jokingly suggesting that she leave her husband and come to Mikhailovskoye, Pushkin sees one of the prerequisites for such an act in her "highly developed organ of flight." In the poem "Count Nulin" the hero unmistakably finds his way by touch at night, for, according to the draft version, he "had an organ of local memory according to Halle's sign."
Phrenological charts of Gall
The organ of local memory - also known as the organ of love of travel - was indeed listed among the brain "organs" mentioned by Gall. In his multi-volume work, he was number XIII, manifested by two bulges located from the root of the nose to the middle of the forehead. According to Gall, people who have a pronounced local memory or sense of the locality tend to travel. Gall believed that these properties are inherent primarily in birds, in connection with which Pushkin, in relation to Kern, poetically calls the organ in charge of them "the organ of flight."
Phrenological charts of Gall
Gall's glory was short-lived. Already in the 19th century, his system was convincingly refuted. Phrenology has long been considered a pseudoscience and is not taken seriously by anyone but enthusiastic amateurs. However, his ideas, from the standpoint of modern science, are absolutely naive, and played their positive role, stimulating the study of brain tissue. Phrenology has served as a source of psychomorphological direction in research on the problem of localization of functions in the brain. Therefore, the words inscribed on the grave of Gall are quite fair: “Let us be grateful to him for what he did, and we will refrain from accusations that he did not do what others would not dare, although he paved the way along which they will go."
For their time, the ideas of Lavater and Gall were innovative and impressive, they found many adherents. They were especially popular among German writers, participants in the Sturm und Drang literary movement (Sturmers) and probably played a certain role in shaping Cesare Lombroso's theory of the innate criminal type. The Italian psychiatrist Lombroso, having worked all his life as a prison doctor, created a really impressive classification of the facial features of criminals. He suggested that criminals not only differ in appearance from normal people, but also carry the rudimentary signs of primitive man. The external manifestations of these signs are the so-called stigmata of crime: the wrong structure of the skull, asymmetry of the face, dulled sensitivity, inability to blush, a tendency to tattoo (!) etc. Anomalies in the psyche are expressed in vindictiveness, vanity, pride, weakness of reason, underdevelopment of moral feelings, peculiarities of speech and even a special writing, reminiscent of the hieroglyphs of the ancients. Guided by these features, Lombroso recognized that it is possible not only to establish the type of a criminal person in general, but also to distinguish between the features inherent in certain categories of criminals: thieves, murderers, rapists, etc. In the book Criminal Man (1876), he writes that “murderers mostly brachycephalic with powerful jaws, long ears and glassy eyes, thieves - dolichocephalic with small eyes, swindlers and arsonists are distinguished by a crooked nose ... ". The teachings of Lombroso did not find further application. Alas, there are too many moral conclusions in his conclusions and too little truth. Of course, it would be very tempting to identify criminals, albeit potential ones for the time being, by the shape of the eyebrows or nose. However, the experience of criminologists shows that crimes are committed by people of very different appearances, sometimes even quite imposing. Conan Doyle's famous hero, already mentioned, stated: "A man of the most disgusting appearance that I have ever met was a great philanthropist who donated without count to the needs of orphans, and the most charming woman I have seen turned out to be a poisoner of her children." One way or another, the works of Lombroso are interesting to read, but it is impossible to use them, at least for the purposes of forensic examination.
The insufficient substantiation of physiognomic theories led to a skeptical attitude towards them by domestic scientists, who were proud of their materialistic worldview. At the same time, it was overlooked that many recognized authorities of materialistic science not only did not deny the relationship between the external and the internal, but also substantiated it logically. So, Ch. Darwin and I. M. Sechenov expressed a reasonable opinion that facial features and especially facial expressions and other expressive movements reflect the functional state nervous system and depend on the characteristics of the human psyche.
“What is scientific in the so-called science of physiognomy,” Charles Darwin reasoned, “depends, it seems, on the fact that each individual reduces mainly only certain muscles of the face, following his personal inclinations. These muscles may be more strongly developed, and therefore the lines and wrinkles of the face, formed by their normal contraction, may become more prominent and visible. (Recall that Aristotle suggested something similar in his time.)
At about the same time, I. M. Sechenov wrote in his book “Reflexes of the Brain”: “The mental activity of a person is expressed, as you know, by external signs; and usually all people, both ordinary people, and scientists, and naturalists, and people involved in the spirit, judge the former by the latter, that is, by external signs ... Without exception, all the qualities of the external manifestations of brain activity, which we characterize, for example, by words : spirituality, passion, mockery, sadness, joy, etc., are nothing but the result of a greater or lesser shortening of some muscle group - an act, as everyone knows, is purely mechanical.
Thus, it becomes obvious that the psychological assessment of appearance is not devoid of scientific grounds. Unfortunately, a person who is fascinated by this problem today is faced with many conflicting sources, many of which are not far removed from medieval scholasticism.
Trying to evaluate others on the basis of some particular theory, we run the risk of drawing superficial and one-sided conclusions. The problem is that such a complex object as a person is unacceptable to evaluate in statics, but only in dynamics. Along with characteristic features appearance, diverse nuances of behavior, both verbal and non-verbal, are subject to analysis. Only a consistent combination of many external features allows us to make a more or less reliable assessment. You should pay attention not only to the shape of the face, but also to such details as intonation of speech, expressive movements, postures and gestures, and even the growth of a communication partner. However, first things first.
