How to remember people's names
We’ve all forgotten someone’s name at one point or another. Here’s how to reduce the chances of that happening.
A while ago, a friend and I were having a chat on the Metro.
Remembering I’d met her partner a few weeks before, I asked, “How’s Simon?”
“Who?” she said.
Reader, his name is Adam. Where ‘Simon’ came from, I don’t know.
I’m not alone in making this kind of flub, judging by the enormous quantity of research I found when I was writing this blog. Luckily, a lot of that research is devoted to things people can do to avoid making naming errors, so let’s get stuck into it.
Side note: I’ve focused on the research about remembering a name that belongs to a face. There is also lots of research out there (like this) on remembering a name that belongs to a voice, but I wanted to keep this blog to a manageable length and the ideas I’ll suggest for improving your memory for the links between faces and names should theoretically work if you adapt them to be about voices instead of faces, because they rely on general memory-boosting techniques rather than anything specific to vision. If you want me to do a version of this blog about the research on voices, let me know.
What makes names so hard to remember?
There are probably several reasons, according to this review from 1993 (an oldie but a goodie).
First off, names are somewhat arbitrary, which makes them harder to learn than other biographical information about a person, like their occupation. I know approximately 43 people called Cate, Kate, Katy, Katie, Cat, Catherine, Catharine, Katherine or any other variant you can think of. Literally the only thing they all have in common is their name. However, if they were all lumberjacks, they might have multiple things in common: muscular shoulders, tendency to wear plaid, often seen in the company of an axe, can magically befriend woodland creatures, etc. Those contextual clues that make it easier to recall occupations simply don’t exist for names.
🎵I’m a lumberjack and I’m called Kat🎵
🎵I’m super swole and my friend’s a bat🎵
Second, even when we know we recognise someone, their name takes a while to access. When we see a familiar person, we go through a three-stage process. To start, we realise they’re familiar, then we remember general facts about their identity, and only after that do we recall their name. A perfect real-world example of this is the conversations you have with your teammates in a Famous Faces pub quiz round: “I know that person! … She’s a drag queen! … Oh, she’s Peppermint!”
Finally, it typically becomes harder as we age to learn new names and harder still to retrieve them from our memories, leading to more and more events of the type “I know this person but what the hell is their name?” The speed of this decline in our ability to learn and remember names varies from person to person but, as a rule of thumb, if you’re over the age of about 60, you might need slightly different tactics from younger people for improving your memory for names.
What won’t work
The research I read for this blog covered both ideas that worked and ideas that really didn’t. To prevent you from wasting your energy on things you might think would work but are unlikely to, don’t bother with…
Saying someone’s name aloud – though this is obviously helpful for some other reasons, like checking you’re pronouncing it correctly.
Saying someone’s name aloud in a weird voice, as seen in the movie The House Bunny. You might think this works because it’s more memorable than just saying the name aloud, but the amount of physical and mental effort involved in doing a weird voice seems to outweigh any benefits of that weirdness being memorable.
Non-invasive electrical stimulation of the brain areas involved in recalling names. While the research suggests this might have a mild benefit, it’s not enough to warrant carrying around all the equipment you’d need and paying a trained technician to apply the stimulation, not to mention we don’t know what the long-term effects of doing this all the time would be.
What will (probably) work
As with all psychology studies, remember that most of the people who take part in them belong to quite a restricted pool of humans: those who are interested in taking part in psychology studies and, often, those who are physically near psychology research facilities, which are more common in rich countries and urban areas. Much of the time these restrictions on who is able to take part means that participants are either students or employees at those research facilities, and therefore likely to be highly educated and – in the case of students – in their late teens and early twenties. Therefore, treat this list of tips with caution, because we aren’t at all clear on how well the research applies to other groups of people. These are things worth trying, but they aren’t guaranteed to work. Fortunately, at least some of the research I found had older adults as participants, so I’ve at least been able to split my tips into broad age categories.
Tips for younger adults
Scroll down if you’re aged 60+ for some tips for your age group.
Test yourself
If you’re a young adult, this is perhaps the single most effective thing you can try. However, the specific type of testing that works the best is often an absolute pain to implement in your everyday life.
If you want to give it a go, you’ll need to set up something called an expanding retrieval schedule. This means gradually increasing the time between tests, and the reason it’s a pain to implement is that the ‘test’ with learning names is usually when you meet the person again, and you won’t necessarily have much control over that. Nonetheless, there are some circumstances when it might be useful:
If the people whose names you’re learning are OK with it, you could make a set of flashcards with photos on one side and their names on the other. If you’ve set yourself a goal of learning their names within a week, you’d test yourself on day 1, day 2, day 4, and day 7 – increasing the time between tests by one day each time.
If everyone is new to each other, for example you’re all beginning a training course together, you can make a game out of it along the lines of the game I Went to the Shops. Gather together in a circle and pick someone to start. They say their own name. The second person says their own name, then the first person’s name. The third person says their own name, then the second person’s, then the first person’s. Carry on round the circle till you get back to the first person, who has to name everyone.
Here’s an example of the expanding retrieval game using my own name and some friends’ names as examples. You’ll notice I do know some people who aren’t called Kate, Catherine, Cat, etc.
If doing an expanding retrieval schedule is too cumbersome for you, then you can try a different testing method that is likely to be less effective but easier to do. If you’re meeting a lot of people in a short space of time, like at a wedding reception, then you’ll probably have noticed that the more people you’ve already met, the harder it is to remember the next person’s name. This is due to proactive interference – that is, the names you’ve already learned are interfering with the names you’re now trying to learn. To deal with this, once you’ve met a few people, give yourself a quick test on their names. Repeat until you’ve met all the people you need to, and you should find that you’re getting many more names correct than you otherwise would have done. The nice thing about this is it’s still effective if you do it under your breath, so no-one else has to know about it.
Try silly mental imagery
This is another strategy that’s unfortunately not that easy to implement. This time it’s not because it’s hard to organise, but rather because it requires a level of creativity that quickly gets draining if you’re meeting more than a few people. It may also distract you from other things you need to be paying attention to, like making the appropriate facial expression as they tell you an anecdote about their dog.
To explain the system, I’ll use the example of Serge Brédart, whose paper on the topic I read.
Look for a prominent facial feature, accessory, or item of clothing that’s unlikely to change over the time you’re learning their name. From his Researchgate profile, I know that Professor Brédart wears a pair of rectangular glasses, so I’ve picked those.
Transform their name into something that looks or sounds similar but is meaningful to you. Though it’s pronounced differently, Brédart looks to me kind of like “bread art”.
Bring the prominent feature and the transformed name together to make one mental image that associates the two things. In this case, I might imagine his glasses are made out of bread – a piece of bread art.
You can try this in combination with an expanding retrieval schedule for an extra boost to your chances of remembering a name, but it will be even more taxing.
Use multiple senses
Name tags: use ‘em
In many situations where you’re meeting new people, they will hopefully be wearing a nametag. If you’re a young adult, to get the most out of this, you’ll want them to say their name aloud as well – the reason I suggest this is that you’ll tend to remember links between names and faces better if you have simultaneous visual and audio information about the name.
To implement this, you can either straight up explain to the person that you’re asking them their name to boost your chances of remembering it, or, if you feel shy, you can try a subtle prompt by going, “Hello, I’m [name],” which should encourage them to say their own in return.
Sleep well
For some useful tips on sleeping, ask a local cat or check out Shleep.
If you’re a young adult trying to learn people’s names over a longer period of time – for example, a teacher learning your new students’ names over the first few weeks of term – then you can relax a little, because no-one will expect you to get everyone’s name right the first day. If there’s an event like a parents’ evening when it’s ultra-important you get it right, then a good night’s sleep should help you improve your accuracy, though not the speed with which you remember someone’s name. It’s not clear what aspect of sleep helps – it could be the total time you spend asleep or something subtler like what proportion of your sleep is deep sleep.
Tips for older adults
Scroll up if you’re aged under 60 for some tips for your age group.
Minimise distractions
Imagine you work at a hospital and you’re meeting a new colleague for the first time. There are likely to be lots of distracting things around – sirens from outside, emails arriving, patients needing your help, and so on. You need to ignore all that irrelevant information as you’re trying to focus on your new colleague’s face and name. Our ability to focus on what’s relevant tends to decline as we age, so, if you’re an older adult, try to meet people in a quiet and distraction-free environment to give yourself the best chance of remembering their name.
You can also help others out – if you’re going to be meeting new people for the first time, you can try to minimise the distractions you’re wearing by saving your sparkliest brooch, brightest hijab or most garishly-patterned tie for another day.
Ask questions about them
While irrelevant information is usually unhelpful, autobiographical information about the person you’re meeting can be really useful for older adults because it gives extra context for remembering who someone is. Depending on the situation, you might want to ask about what they like to do in their spare time, where they live, or what their job is.
Ask for feedback and reminders
Young and middle-aged adults benefit from repeatedly testing themselves on names and faces, but older adults typically don’t. However, if you are an older adult, you can make repeated testing work better as a strategy for remembering names by getting feedback consisting of whether you’re right or wrong and then a reminder of the correct answer. If you’re using something like flashcards, you can give yourself feedback and reminders as part of testing. In person, it might be a little trickier, but you can try explaining that you want to do your best to remember names and asking for feedback and reminders from the people you’re meeting.
References
Brédart, S. (2019). Strategies to improve name learning. European Psychologist, 24(4), 349-358.
Cohen, G., & Burke, D. M. (1993). Memory for proper names: A review. Memory, 1(4), 249-263.
Murray, C., Tarlow, M., Rissman, J., & Shams, L. (2021). Exploiting multisensory encoding of names via name tags facilitates remembering. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zeuq7
Patel, P. (2020). Producing names with a bizarre voice does not improve memory for face–name pairs (Master’s thesis, McMaster University). MacSphere. http://hdl.handle.net/11375/25886
The ugly side of cuteness
What makes an animal cute, and why is that sometimes a bad thing?
Quick note! ‘Cute’ is a word that does a lot of work. According to one of my favourite sites, the Online Etymology Dictionary, it was originally a shortening of ‘acute’, as in ‘mentally sharp'. In 19th century America, the meaning somehow changed to ‘pretty’ or ‘attractive’. These days, we might use it to mean either sexually attractive (“a cute guy”) or something like charming, loveable or endearing (“a cute dog”). Just so we’re clear, throughout this blog I’m using ‘cute’ in this last sense.
You know me, literally any excuse to post a picture of a dog.
What makes something or someone cute?
A lot of the research about cuteness is about things that have faces, mainly humans, cats, and dogs. All these species, humans included, have a characteristic called neoteny – that is, they all look somewhat like baby versions of other species. Adult humans look a lot like young chimpanzees and gorillas (though less hairy, obviously); adult cats look like wildcat kittens; adult dogs look like wolf cubs.
What marks neoteny is similar across humans, cats and dogs. Compared to other primates/felines/canines, we share features like:
A large head relative to the rest of the body
A rounded face
Large eyes
A small nose
A small mouth
These features - let’s call them baby-facedness - are even more pronounced in babies, kittens and puppies than they are in adults, cats and dogs. Baby-facedness is one thing we might consider cute and our brains do seem to respond to it in a way that indicates we find it pleasing.
An aside about babies
I don’t know if you’re like me, but I don’t find many babies cute. My internal reaction to most babies is a pretty emotionally neutral, ‘Huh, a small human.’
I will, of course, still make a fuss because I am thrilled for the friend or relative who has presented me with their new child. There are occasional exceptions to my overall neutrality – like my nephew, who looked like a tiny delightful gnome in his first few months. I recognise that I likely felt that way because I am related to him.
This is by way of saying that most of the research I read about cuteness was about neoteny and frankly I was suspicious that the researchers seemed to think we all find it cute. However, I did find a small amount of research on other aspects of cuteness. For example, we may also find pictures of animals cuter if they’re small, if their species is fairly closely related to ours, and if they’re doing something we think of as human-like. We’ll come back to this in a bit.
Babies: fine, I guess.
Back to neoteny. By now, you might be thinking, Why are some species neotenous and not others? Well, one possibility is that it’s a by-product of domestication.
In domesticating dogs and cats, we’ve selectively bred less and less aggressive animals. Babies of any species are inherently much less threatening than adults. This type of baby-cuteness isn’t only about the face; it also includes things like clumsy behaviour, being soft to the touch, and having a high-pitched voice.
So, when you’re trying to find a non-aggressive animal to be the parent of the next generation, you might be inclined to pick the one that looks, sounds and feels most baby-like. Similarly, our ancestors might have preferred being friends with more baby-like humans because of this implied non-aggression. As much of being a human involves co-operating with others, those who most easily make friends – of any species – are also those who are most likely to survive and have children.
But… while we’ve been busy surrounding ourselves with cuteness, it’s been having effects on us too.
The ‘cute response’
When we see something or someone who’s cute in a baby-faced way, many of us respond in a particular way: a desire to care for, attend to, and protect the cute animal/person.
There isn’t a word in English (or indeed in many other languages) to describe the emotional response we’re having when we see something that makes us go ‘aww’. This can make it a bit difficult to research. Nonetheless, whatever you might want to call that feeling, we seem to develop it pretty early in childhood.
Astonishingly, cuteness appears to have a positive effect on our fine motor skills, the small muscle movements you need to do things like write, do up buttons, and, er, play the game Operation – the last of these being the thing researchers tested performance on when looking at whether cute puppies and kittens could have this effect. We also focus more on small details than usual after we see a cute animal, and we’re more likely to want to share things with others. Researchers think this might mean that seeing a baby-like face has two effects: making us want to approach the cute thing and/or getting us ready to look after it, which is likely to require sharing resources and careful, delicate movements.
I guess this means cuteness might also make you better at the tiny movements you need to do some kinds of science, which is cool.
Sorry, this ending is a downer
Cuteness also has its painful side. Earlier I mentioned research on non-neoteny cuteness predictors like species being fairly closely related to our own. In this experiment, the researchers also looked at what effect this and other cuteness factors had on participants’ willingness to protect a species. I’m sure it won’t surprise you to know that people were generally more willing to protect the animals they found cute. This and other aesthetic whims can be a real pain for conservationists, because people may not want to help with conservation of species they don’t find appealing in some way. Similarly, less cute-looking pets might have a harder time getting adopted than others of their species – but it’s not all roses for the cute ones, either.
Many people find pugs and French bulldogs cute, and with their bulging eyes and squashy noses they are certainly among the most baby-faced of dog breeds. The problem is, those features also come with serious side effects. Ever heard a pug wheezing? That’s because that squashy nose makes it really difficult to breathe.
Not so cute now, eh?
Long story short: adopt the most hideous pet you can find and consider joining the Ugly Animal Preservation Society.
Why we see faces in inanimate objects
It’s called pareidolia and it’s amazing! But why do our brains do it?
Back in the 1970s, NASA sent two spacecraft called Viking 1 and Viking 2 to Mars. While in orbit, they took lots of pictures of the surface, including a region called Cydonia. Cydonia is pretty cool! It’s a distinctive colour that makes it obvious if you look at it through a telescope on Earth and it might once have been a coastal region. Oh, and it contains a 1.5km-wide hill in the shape of a human face.
Sort of.
Some people got very excited and started yelling about how the Face on Mars meant there were aliens on Mars, hooray, neighbours! The Drake equation tells us that there are almost certainly aliens somewhere, but they are unlikely to be local aliens, so NASA and other space agencies took a more measured approach and went back to examine Cydonia with a camera that didn’t have the same megapixel rating as a potato – which revealed that it was, alas, just a hill with some interesting shadows on it.
Alas.
The thing is, even though I know it’s just a hill, I can’t quite get over it looking like a face. What gives?
Well, this is a classic example of a weird thing our brain does called pareidolia, which is Ancient Greek for “beside-image”, so thank you to the person who gave us this difficult-to-spell and etymologically-unclear word. Pareidolia is your mind’s tendency to decide that things that look vaguely familiar are actually something familiar: the Face on Mars, the Man in the Moon, the Horsehead Nebula, and here on Earth, Jesus in a Marmite cap.
Gaining pareidolia
When we think about human interaction carefully, it’s no surprise that our brains do this. At least for sighted people, a lot of interacting with other people relies on recognising familiar faces (is this person my mother or a stranger?) and on detecting the emotions they are showing (did they find the joke funny or should I run away in shame?). It’s so vitally important that we do these two tasks well that our brains are oversensitive to things that could be faces: pareidolia is basically a false positive. Much better to think something is a face when it’s not than to blank someone we rely on for physical or social needs, because the consequences of that second mistake are potentially much more severe. This importance is reflected in the activity of the brain, because the way we react to seeing faces and to seeing things that look like faces is very similar indeed [i].
Archimboldo’s ‘Vertumnus’ (public domain), the very apex of playing with your food
Of course, looking at faces is only one type of social interaction – we also very commonly interact using speech. So it should be no surprise that as well as seeing faces where there aren’t any, we also hear voices when there aren’t any [ii].
We’re not the only species where social interaction is really important – the same is true for a lot of primates, for example. I went looking for examples of pareidolia in other species and I am pleased to tell you that rhesus monkeys also have it, though of course for things that look like rhesus monkey faces rather than things that look like human faces [iii]. I didn’t find any examples in other animals, but I think that might be because we haven’t been looking rather than because pareidolia isn’t there.
Back to humans! Pareidolia starts happening when we’re around 8 months old [iv] [v], but we don’t all show it to the same extent. Young women tend to have it to a greater extent than young men, for example [vi]. There are also some neurological differences that can make some people less likely to experience pareidolia than others: if you have autism, you will probably be less susceptible to pareidolia than most [vii], and if you have Williams syndrome, you’re likely to be even less susceptible [viii]. However, we’re not clear on why these individual differences exist, yet.
We have a clearer idea on some other individual differences, like religious people and paranormal believers being more likely to experience pareidolia than non-religious people and paranormal sceptics [ix]. This fits with a general pattern among both religious people and paranormal believers of assigning meaning and intention where others would probably not. To understand this, let’s imagine someone’s playing Bananagrams (or Scrabble, but Bananagrams is superior). Over the course of several turns, they pick out the exact letters of their own name, in order. If this person is a nonreligious sceptic, they would probably decide it was a strange coincidence and think no more of it. If they were a religious person, they might decide it was meaningful, a message from God. If they were a paranormal believer, they might also decide it was meaningful, but with a different interpretation, perhaps a psychic message. Similarly, these three people looking at something that could be a face or could just be the way a rock has eroded might decide it was a coincidence, evidence of reincarnation, or evidence of elves trapping giants in the earth.
Face-like rock formation in Lower Antelope Canyon, Arizona, USA
Trick of the light, or ELVES?
Using pareidolia
Pareidolia is more than just a side effect of our brains making sure we don’t miss faces – we can also use it! To finish, let’s look at a few examples of those uses.
You might know about Parkinson’s disease, a long-term disorder that gradually destroys the nervous system. While Parkinson’s isn’t curable, its progress can be slowed down with treatment, so for maximum effectiveness, you’d want to catch and treat Parkinson’s as early as possible. Amazingly, we might be able to use pareidolia to do this, because one of the things that we see in the early stages of Parkinson’s is an increase in pareidolia [x]. This is probably related to the visual hallucinations that a lot of people start developing as the disease progresses, because the specific thing that happens is not saying, “Hey, that looks like a face!” but really and truly thinking that not-faces are faces.
Medical professionals also purposely make use of pareidolia as a memory technique [xi]! I was amazed at the variety of pareidolias that are out there, so I won’t go through them all, but a couple that I thought were particularly cool were the ‘starfish sign’ for a subarachnoid haemorrhage – bleeding in the brain that shows up as a five-pointed ‘star’ on a brain scan – and the ‘winking owl’ sign which shows up on X-rays of the spine when a part of the vertebra called the pedicle is damaged on one side but not the other.
Lastly and perhaps most weirdly, we might be able to use pareidolia as a means of interesting people in conservation. In one study [xii], researchers showed people images of butterflies with and without eyespots. Hold up…
Butterfly with eye-like spot on its wing
Spot the eye, lol
Then the researchers asked them how they felt about conservation efforts focused on each of those types of butterflies. People tended to be more positive about conservation efforts focused on the butterflies with eyespots… but the eyespots didn’t affect people’s willingness to get more informed about or donate to butterfly conservation. So, if you’ve just excitedly picked up a bag of googly eyes and some superglue, I’m afraid it’s probably not going to work.
References
[i] Churches, O., Baron-Cohen, S., & Ring, H. (2009). Seeing face-like objects: an event-related potential study. Neuroreport, 20(14), 1290-1294.
[ii] Nees, M. A., & Phillips, C. (2015). Auditory pareidolia: Effects of contextual priming on perceptions of purportedly paranormal and ambiguous auditory stimuli. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29(1), 129-134.
[iii] Taubert, J., Wardle, S. G., Flessert, M., Leopold, D. A., & Ungerleider, L. G. (2017). Face pareidolia in the rhesus monkey. Current Biology, 27(16), 2505-2509.
[iv] Kato, M., & Mugitani, R. (2015). Pareidolia in infants. PloS ONE, 10(2), e0118539.
[v] Kobayashi, M., Otsuka, Y., Nakato, E., Kanazawa, S., Yamaguchi, M. K., & Kakigi, R. (2012). Do infants recognize the Arcimboldo images as faces? Behavioral and near-infrared spectroscopic study. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 111(1), 22-36.
[vi] Pavlova, M. A., Scheffler, K., & Sokolov, A. N. (2015). Face-n-Food: Gender differences in tuning to faces. PLoS ONE, 10(7), e0130363.
[vii] Pavlova, M. A., Guerreschi, M., Tagliavento, L., Gitti, F., Sokolov, A. N., Fallgatter, A. J., & Fazzi, E. (2017). Social cognition in autism: face tuning. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 2734.
[viii] Pavlova, M. A., Heiz, J., Sokolov, A. N., & Barisnikov, K. (2016). Social cognition in Williams Syndrome: face tuning. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1131.
[ix] Riekki, T., Lindeman, M., Aleneff, M., Halme, A., & Nuortimo, A. (2013). Paranormal and religious believers are more prone to illusory face perception than skeptics and non‐believers. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 27(2), 150-155.
[x] Uchiyama, M., Nishio, Y., Yokoi, K., Hosokai, Y., Takeda, A., & Mori, E. (2015). Pareidolia in Parkinson's disease without dementia: a positron emission tomography study. Parkinsonism & Related Disorders, 21(6), 603-609.
[xi] Fatehi, D., Salehi, M. G., Farshchian, N., Mohammadi, M., & Rostamzadeh, A. (2016). Pareidolia as additional approach to improving education and learning in neuroradiology; New cases and literature review. Biomedical and Pharmacology Journal, 9(1), 81-89.
[xii] Manesi, Z., Van Lange, P. A., & Pollet, T. V. (2015). Butterfly eyespots: Their potential influence on aesthetic preferences and conservation attitudes. PLoS ONE, 10(11), e0141433.
Selfie-ish behaviour
Quick, take a selfie! Now, click to find out why you’re likely to have shown one side of your face to the camera.
Welcome to That Thinking Feeling, a blog about the everyday questions that psychology can answer. I used to be a psychology researcher and lecturer, so I have some of the answers! Others I have to look up, but then I can distil them for you in a fun way.
Surprisingly, psychology can tell us whether we have a best side! But before we begin, take a selfie – but make sure you’re smiling! (This is for science. I am not just asking you to smile for no reason, promise.)
…
OK. Now, have a look at that selfie. Have you turned sideways at all, even a little bit? Which side of your face is showing more? (This might be a tricky question to answer – my phone keeps selfies in mirror image format, but yours might flip it over.) I bet you’ve got more of the left side of your face in the photo – by which I mean the left as viewed by someone looking at you, not your own left.
Now, the time I tried getting my students to take a selfie when I was teaching them about this in a classroom it only half-worked, so I could be wrong. But when Bruno and Bertamini [i] tested the idea by asking 300 people in Italy and the UK to take selfies, they found that most of them did have more of the right side of their faces showing than the left side, regardless of things like handedness and gender. Since then, the same thing has been found in people in multiple different countries including Thailand, Brazil and Russia [ii].
So, people clearly think that they have a ‘best side’. Why, though?
The main theory is that people show more emotion on the right side of their face than the left side. Allow me to demonstrate with a selfie of my own and the magic of photo editing.
Three versions of the author: original, with left side mirrored, with right side mirrored
Tada, asymmetry!
Which one of these versions of me is looking most happy? I’d say it’s the right side mirrored one: my mouth is smiling more; my eyes are wider open and my eyebrows are raised more than the left side mirrored one.
Way back in 1978, researchers [iii] suggested that emotion is expressed more strongly on the right side of the face. This is because the bit of the brain that deals with showing emotion on the right side of the face is slightly quicker and more expressive than the bit that deals with showing emotion on the left side of the face.
We like seeing a facial display of emotion. It lets us know what to expect from the other person, what actions might be socially appropriate, whether (if they’re looking fearful) we should check behind us for large predators like lions or overbearing bosses. I think what’s happening when we show our right side to the camera is probably the result of all the times we got a sliiiightly more beneficial response from showing other people the right sides of our faces than we did when we showed them the left sides of our faces. Though there are situations in which this can be undesirable – for example, scientists are judged as more scientific if they are showing the other side of the face in a portrait, perhaps because they are perceived as less ‘emotional’ and more ‘rational’ [iv]. (I am getting a strong whiff of sexism here, what joy.)
So… do we show all emotions more strongly on the right side of the face? Maybe.
Before we get to the answer, it’s important to know that much of the brain is contralateral. This means that in most, but not all, cases, the left side of the brain deals with the right side of the body, and the right side of the brain deals with the left side of the body.
Unfortunately, to make matters wildly confusing, when researchers talk about the left side of the brain, they’re talking about the left side as perceived by the person with the brain. When researchers talk about the left side of the face, they’re talking about the left side as perceived by someone looking at that face.
Sign with arrows in Death Valley National Park
I am not good at left and right at the best of times so this is an absolute nightmare for me.
Bear all this in mind as I tell you about three theories:
The right-hemisphere hypothesis [v] says that the right hemisphere is more involved in every emotion than the left hemisphere. If this is correct, every emotion should be shown more on one side of the face than the other.
The emotional-valence hypothesis [vi] says that the right hemisphere is more involved in negative emotions like fear and grief, while the left hemisphere is more involved in positive emotions like love and happiness. If this is correct, we should show negative emotions more strongly on one side of the face and positive emotions more strongly on the other.
The approach-withdrawal hypothesis [vii] says that the right hemisphere is more involved in emotions that make us want to withdraw from something, and the left in emotions that make us want to approach something. This overlaps quite a lot with the emotional-valence hypothesis because negative emotions typically make us want to withdraw (think of disgust), while positive emotions make us want to approach (think of love) – but this is complex because of emotions like sadness, which are negative but may make us want to approach others for support.
We don’t yet know which of these theories is correct, if any. Maybe more than one of them is right [viii]! To make matters more complicated (and also more interesting), we are far from the only animals to have some kind of difference in the way the two halves of the brain deal with emotion. In fact, it seems to be common to all vertebrates [ix], so it’s probably quite an old feature of the brain, in evolutionary terms.
To finish, I’d like to tell you one last cool fact from Bruno and Bertamini’s selfie study. Back in the days before cameras, people couldn’t take selfies (this is not the cool fact, please bear with me for a couple of sentences). However, if you had access to the right materials, you could draw or paint yourself, like Sofonisba Anguissola in the painting below.
Self-portait at the Easel Painting a Devotional Panel, Sofonisba Anguissola (public domain).
Starting around the 17th century, there was a huge rise in the number of artists choosing to paint self-portraits showing the left side of their faces – except it’s actually their right side, because good mirrors had started to become available. Later, when photography started becoming widespread, the trend reversed – right cheeks are really right cheeks again, and not left cheeks in reverse.
References
[i] Bruno, N., & Bertamini, M. (2013). Self-portraits: smartphones reveal a side bias in non-artists. PLoS One, 8(2), e55141.
[ii] Tifentale, A., & Manovich, L. (2015). Selfiecity: Exploring photography and self-fashioning in social media. In Postdigital aesthetics (pp. 109-122). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
[iii] Sackeim, H. A., & Gur, R. C. (1978). Lateral asymmetry in intensity of emotional expression. Neuropsychologia, 16(4), 473-481.
[iv] Ten Cate, C. (2002). Posing as professor: Laterality in posing orientation for portraits of scientists. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 26(3), 175-192.
[v] Borod, J. C., Kent, J., Koff, E., Martin, C., & Alpert, M. (1988). Facial asymmetry while posing positive and negative emotions: Support for the right hemisphere hypothesis. Neuropsychologia, 26(5), 759-764.
[vi] Silberman, E. K., & Weingartner, H. (1986). Hemispheric lateralization of functions related to emotion. Brain and cognition, 5(3), 322-353.
[vii] Davidson, R. J., Ekman, P., Saron, C. D., Senulis, J. A., & Friesen, W. V. (1990). Approach-withdrawal and cerebral asymmetry: emotional expression and brain physiology: I. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(2), 330.
[viii] Killgore, W. D., & Yurgelun-Todd, D. A. (2007). The right-hemisphere and valence hypotheses: could they both be right (and sometimes left)? Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(3), 240-250.
[ix] Leliveld, L. M., Langbein, J., & Puppe, B. (2013). The emergence of emotional lateralization: evidence in non-human vertebrates and implications for farm animals. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 145(1-2), 1-14.