ArticleScientific reports2022
Is a downwards head tilt a cross-cultural signal of dominance? Evidence for a universal visual illusion.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- The interpersonal and intrapsychic functions of the pride expression.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Is gender primacy universal?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- An exploratory study of the effect of age and gender on face scanning during affect recognition in immersive virtual reality.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Facial emotion recognition in patients with depression compared to healthy controls when using human avatars.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Registered report: Social face evaluation: ethnicity-specific differences in the judgement of trustworthiness of faces and facial parts.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The present pre-registered research provides the first evidence that a downwards head tilt is sufficient to communicate dominance from a neutral facial expression among the Mayangna, members of an unindustrialized, small-scale traditional society in Nicaragua who have had minimal exposure to North American culture. Consistent with the Action Unit imposter effect observed in North American populations (Witkower and Tracy in Psychol Sci 30:893-906, 2019), changes to the appearance of the upper face caused by a downwards head tilt were sufficient to elicit perceptions of dominance among this population. Given that the Mayangna are unlikely to associate a downwards head tilt or related apparent facial changes with dominance as a result of cross-cultural learning, the present results suggest that perceptions of dominance formed from a downwards head tilt, and the visual illusion shaping these perceptions, are a widely generalizable, and possibly universal, feature of human psychology.
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Registered trials
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