Social Perception of Facial Color Appearance for Human Trichromatic Versus Dichromatic Color Vision
Typical human color vision is trichromatic, on the basis that we have three distinct classes of photoreceptors. A recent evolutionary account posits that trichromacy facilitates detecting subtle skin color changes to better distinguish important social states related to proceptivity, health, and emo...
Saved in:
Published in | Personality & social psychology bulletin Vol. 46; no. 1; pp. 51 - 63 |
---|---|
Main Authors | , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Los Angeles, CA
SAGE Publications
01.01.2020
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
Cover
Loading…
Summary: | Typical human color vision is trichromatic, on the basis that we have three distinct classes of photoreceptors. A recent evolutionary account posits that trichromacy facilitates detecting subtle skin color changes to better distinguish important social states related to proceptivity, health, and emotion in others. Across two experiments, we manipulated the facial color appearance of images consistent with a skin blood perfusion response and asked participants to evaluate the perceived attractiveness, health, and anger of the face (trichromatic condition). We additionally simulated what these faces would look like for three dichromatic conditions (protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia). The results demonstrated that flushed (relative to baseline) faces were perceived as more attractive, healthy, and angry in the trichromatic and tritanopia conditions, but not in the protanopia and deuteranopia conditions. The results provide empirical support for the social perception account of trichromatic color vision evolution and lead to systematic predictions of social perception based on ecological social perception theory. |
---|---|
Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 0146-1672 1552-7433 |
DOI: | 10.1177/0146167219841641 |