Does this look like a man or a woman?

There now exists lots of really interesting and complex software that allows you to take a photograph of someone’s face and change their apparent age and sex. Yesterday I happened to have access to one of the most sophisticated ‘face morphing’ programmes in the world, and so wondered what I would look like if I were a woman. This is the result…

Can you identify someone’s personality from their face?

A few weeks ago, Rob Jenkins (University of Glasgow) and I asked New Scientist readers to send in a portrait photograph and rate themselves on various personality dimensions. We had over 1000 images, and we would now like to see if you can identify certain personality traits from composite photographs. Click here to take part in the study. The results will be announced in a few weeks.

Once you are done, you might like to discover how the same type of work has helped discover what the offspring of a human and a baboon would look like. Click here (or look at the picture of Milgram in the post above).

The Face Project

Rob Jenkins from the University of Glasgow and I have teamed up with New Scientist magazine to carry out an experiment into the relationship between facial appearance and personality. We have invited the readers of New Scientist to submit their photographs and complete a simple online measure of personality. We are currently analyzing the faces and will soon post a link to the second phase of the experiment.