Author: colby

I’ve referenced this paper in a previous post .

In this three part study, behavior was analyzed in 1: The lab, 2: Varsity hockey players, and 3: Professional hockey players.

Lab experiment: 

The aggression of subjects was determined by having them play a game in which the goal was to score points. The more points you scored the more money you were supposed to get. It was a very simple game in which you play against an opponent. The salient feature of this game used to gauge aggression was a button you could press to take away points from your opponent. These points were not given to you, and your reward at the end of the game had nothing to do with your opponents points. So taking the time to ‘punish’ your opponent served no other purpose than to do just that. You would in fact probably score less points and make less money if you spent time punishing your opponent. So I DO think this game was a very good way to determine aggression in people. Of course aggression isn’t that simple and there are other factors a person can possess that would override their aggression, but I can’t think of a better way to determine aggression given such a simple experiment. I think it is quite a suitable method.

Varsity and Pro Hockey Players:

Pictures of  each hockey player’s face was obtained and analyzed for bizygomatic width (width measured from left cheek to right cheek). Aggression was determined by analyzing number of penalty minutes obtained per game for each player. This is a reasonable measure of aggression as players receive penalty minutes for very typical aggressive behavior.

In both the lab experiment, and analysis of the hockey players the study determined that facial width to height ratio, tracked with aggression.

I just read: “Facing a psychopath: Detecting the dark triad from emotionally-neutral faces, using prototypes from the Personality Faceaurus” by Nick Holtzman. This was a fascinating study and a pleasure to read. In this study, photographs of 48 women and 33 men were taken. These subjects also did written self assessments using tests for the Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy). In addition to the self assessment, peers of each subject also gave a written assessment in forms of explicit values for the three traits of the Dark  Triad for each of the subjects. Prototype faces were then created by morphing faces of the 48 women and 33 men.  In total, 12 prototypes were created using all possible value combinations of the following variables: gender(2)*Dark Triad Trait(3)*Low or High(2) = 12. Observers were then instructed to rate each of the 12 faces on an 11 point scale. -5 being high level of confidence in the face on the left, and +5 being high level confidence in the face on the right. The prompt being a description of a dark triad trait. Analysis of the observers rating compared to the combined self and peer assessment of each subject shows that observers were able to predict Dark Triad traits with a degree of success significantly higher than random chance. They were able to do this, by only viewing the face of each subject. This study along with others, indicates that craniofacial structure is diagnostic of many different psychological traits.