Beards Influence Emotion Recognition

Beards are a sexually dimorphic masculine facial feature. The presence of a full beard on the face has been found to increase explicit ratings of aggressiveness and dominance; however, research is yet to investigate whether and how beards influence the recognition of facial emotional expressions. To address this, participants categorised facial expressions of happiness and anger (Experiments 1 and 2) or sadness (Experiment 3) as quickly and accurately as possible. These expressions were posed by the same individuals photographed with at least four weeks of untrimmed facial hair growth and again when clean-shaven. Participants were faster to categorise expressions of anger than happiness on bearded faces, but faster to categorize expressions of happiness than anger when the faces were clean-shaven. In a subsequent study, participants were faster to categorise happiness than sadness on bearded faces, but were no faster to categorise happiness or sadness on clean-shaven faces. These patterns suggest that beards influence our earliest impressions of others; enhancing expressions of aggression but concealing sadness. These findings provide evidence to that beards may be a signal of that increases perceived dominance and formidability even in the early stages of face processing