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...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Personality & social psychology bulletin 2020-01, Vol.46 (1), p.51-63
Main Authors: Thorstenson, Christopher A., Pazda, Adam D., Elliot, Andrew J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Anger
Biological Evolution
Blood
Color
Color blindness
Color Perception
Color Vision
Facial Recognition
Female
Humans
Male
Skin color
Skin Pigmentation
Social Perception
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
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.
ISSN:0146-1672
1552-7433
DOI:10.1177/0146167219841641