{"id":55550,"date":"2013-08-21T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2013-08-21T17:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=55550"},"modified":"2015-09-01T21:39:47","modified_gmt":"2015-09-02T02:39:47","slug":"academics-emotions-and-the-head-shot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/08\/21\/academics-emotions-and-the-head-shot\/","title":{"rendered":"Academics, Emotions, and the Head Shot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fun fact: because the right<\/em> side of the brain is more involved in processing emotions than the left and each side of the brain controls the opposite side of the body, the left<\/em> side of the face is generally more expressive.<\/p>\n

We humans must know this on some unconscious level, because self-portraits (or “selfies<\/a>“) tend to feature the left side of the face<\/a> more often than the right. In fact, real portraits — you know, painted by artists —\u00a0show the same bias<\/a>\u00a0going all the way back to the 16th century.<\/p>\n

I borrow these fascinating insights from a blog post<\/a> by Owen Churches, a psychologist who wanted to know if all types of people leaned towards showing their emotional side, or if there were exceptions. \u00a0He and his colleagues decided to look at academics, collecting 5,829 head shots appearing on professors’ faculty pages. \u00a0He found that English and Psychology professors were most likely to pose in ways that drew attention to the left side of their face, but Engineering professors did not. \u00a0This, Churches writes, “suggests that these hard scientists seek to display themselves to the world as the unemotional clich\u00e9s of popular myth.”<\/p>\n

So, I thought I’d do a little experiment. \u00a0I collected the head shots of everyone in the sociology department at my college, Occidental, and everyone in the physics department (we don’t have engineering, alas). Trend holds!<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a> \"2\"<\/a><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fun fact: because the right side of the brain is more involved in processing emotions than the left and each side of the brain controls the opposite side of the body, the left side of the face is generally more expressive. We humans must know this on some unconscious level, because self-portraits (or “selfies“) tend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":56570,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[209,664,329,675,37],"class_list":["post-55550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-biology","tag-emotion","tag-psychology","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/08\/Screenshot_31.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55550"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57995,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55550\/revisions\/57995"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}