顔写真の明るさとコントラストが印象形成に与える影響

抄録

The process of deducing personality from fragmentary information about an unknown person is called impression formation. We investigated how the brightness and contrast of facial photographs affect how the impression of personality is formed. We changed the brightness and contrast of facial photographs (male and female average faces) in a stepwise fashion, and assessed their personalities using the semantic differential method. From the results of a factor analysis, three factors were extracted: individual likableness, vitality, and social desirability. We then conducted a two-factor analysis of variance for the subscale scores in each of the three factors. We found that there were significant interactions between brightness and contrast in all three factors for the photographs of female faces. On the other hand, for the photographs of male faces, there was one significant interaction only in the factor of individual likableness. Additionally, the results of simple main effect tests show that brightness affects the impression of individual likableness, contrast affects that of social desirability, and both brightness and contrast affect the impression of vitality.