The FACEDIFF team is comprised of 15 staff working over the three sections of the project. At this mid-stage of the project, the human behaviour team have produced three outputs, the first two using existing data while Covid-19 prevented the collection of new data. Existing data from an ESRC funded project has been analysed showing that older adults with more agreeable and extroverted personality styles have larger social networks (Rollings et al., 2022). Existing data from a funded British Academy grant has been examined showing people who are more expressive when they are stressed are more likeable (Whitehouse et al., 2022). We have also completed an extensive pilot study prior to the main larger scale studies. We recorded naturalistic social interactions via video call between 52 participants and a confederate, and then asked 176 independent raters to make judgements about the participants in the call. More expressive and agreeable people were rated as more likeable, and were better negotiators during a conflict social interaction. We are now aiming to replicate this effect with a large, multimodal corpus of 1,656 recorded conversations. The anatomy team have conducted facial dissections on two human cadaveric specimens. Around 15-20 additional new specimens have been identified for use within the project, along with 44 head and neck specimens housed for teaching purposes. Thirty-four macaque specimens have been identified and secured for dissection. The team also built a digital dissection and computer model using the MRI data of the face. The primate behaviour team have completed data collection with wild macaques and built a video library of ~1950 videos (from ~105 individuals) for facial behaviour analysis. The team have also collected data with captive macaques which is approximately 75% complete. This includes social network data and close-up video footage on ~75 individuals of 9 social groups, totalling ~50 hours of video footage and ~200 hours of focal data, plus data on mother-infant interactions. Cognitive experiments have also been conducted with the captive macaques, testing 90 individuals on their facial expression processing expertise. Finally, the whole FACEDIFF team have worked on two review papers: an analysis of Charles Darwin’s original comparisons between human facial expressions and those of primates, and an opinion paper arguing that the face is central to all primate communication.
