Faces and heads

There is a phenomenon that when a boy has a hammer, everything needs hammering.  The sayings that “when it rains, it pours” and “birds of a feather flock together” are similar: conditions for one event produce several at a time.  I like the Indian saying that when a pickpocket meets a saint, he only sees his pockets. 

 

The other day, we were the outstanding book "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" by Mary Ann Shaffer and Anne Barrows.  It is a novel but based on the 5 year occupation by the Germans in WWII of Guernsey and Jersey Islands off the coast of France.  At one point in the story, one of the women on the island gets a book on phrenology and begins analyzing the head bumps of everyone around.  She soon decides there are too many loose ends and contradictions in the procedures and abandons the practice. 

 

Meanwhile, I am listening to "People and Cultures of the World", a Teaching Company course by Prof. Edward Fischer of Vanderbilt University.  Fischer emphasizes that there are human constants among the varied practices and world views of different societies.  I know that research has shown that many different peoples can recognize facial expressions from other cultures pretty well. 

 

Then, while these items are getting my attention, up comes this post on the British Psychology Society Research Digest blog

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/search?q=faces

 

I have read elsewhere that no species of animals has as much information conveyed between members as humans do with their faces.  The picture at the link above shows a picture of the back of a man's head:

Researchers are interested in the inferences that people make based on facial and head features.  For instance, the wider the head relative to the height of the head, the more aggressive that man was judged to be.

 

I am interested in what might be called backchannel or feedback correlations.  If we tend to think such a person is aggressive, we may well convey that idea to the person who may then decide to meet that expectation.

 

We humans can speak and think but we still get lots of our ideas from what we see and what we think we know about others.