Abstract:

People can quickly form the first impression of the strangers’ personality according to their face cues and/or voice cues. To explore the difference and the similarity of these two ways of personality perception, we compared these two sides of studies reported by the same teams.

Firstly, both the first impression of face-personality perception and the first impression of voice-personality perception have similar two -dimensional structure models. Some studies had named them as "valence-dominance dimensional model" and others had named them as "approachability-capability dimensional model". The two dimensions reflect inference about the person’s intentions——harmful v.s. harmless, and the person’s ability to implement these intentions, respectively. Furthermore, considering from the perspectives of occurrence and development, cognitive formation mechanism, physiological mechanism and neural mechanism, the internal mechanism of the first impression of face- and voice-personality perception are similar to some extent.

On the other hand, there are some differences between the first impression of face- and voice-personality perception, including being different in some specific personality traits contained in the same dimension, the rate of the total variation explained by the same dimension or the personality traits, and the perceived reliability of the same dimension, etc.. Such differences indicate that, during the formation of the first impression of personality perception, the face and the voice cues are different in sensitive personality traits and sensitive dimensions. Face cues may be more sensitive to the valence/approachability dimension and the related personality traits, while voice cues may be more sensitive to the dominance/capability dimension and the related personality traits. In addition, face cues and voice cues provide different physical properties for the overgeneralization of cognition to rely on, therefore, the cognitive process and the results of the overgeneralization vary between these two modality processing, that is, the overgeneralization for some specific content and cognitive mechanism have the modal specificity. Some studies have disclosed neural evidence that the differences between two modal processing were manifested in the early stage of cognitive processing.

Therefore, it is valuable to know the whole picture and the essence of similarities and differences between the first impression of face- and voice-personality perception. Their similarities consist of the basis for the integration of face-voice cues in the first impression of personality perception. Their differences indicate that face and voice would have adaptive weight allocation in the integration of personality perception. In the future study, it is necessary to directly compare the first impression of face- and voice-personality perception based on the same group of participants who provided the face and the voice stimuli, so as to directly, systematically and comprehensively reveal their similarities and differences. Secondly, since previous studies mainly used the open -ended subjective evaluation as the experimental task, focusing on the results of the first impression of personality perception, future research can design experimental tasks compatible with neuro-imaging techniques and investigate the process characteristics of the first impression of face- and voice -personality perception. In addition, as the sensitive personality traits and sensitive dimensions of faces and voice cues might be different, it is important to explore how people integrate these two sources of information and form a holistic first impression of personality perception.

Key words: first impression, personality perception, face, voice