Face

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For other uses, see Face (disambiguation).
"Faces" redirects here. For other uses, see Faces (disambiguation).

Face

Ventrolateral aspect of the face with skin removed, showing muscles

of the face.

Details

Identifiers

Latin Facies, facia

MeSH D005145

TA A01.1.00.006

FMA 24728

Anatomical terminology

[edit on Wikidata]
The face is the front of an animal's head that features three of the head's sense organs, the eyes,
nose, and mouth, and through which animals express many of their emotions.[1][2] The face is crucial
for human identity, and damage such as scarring or developmental deformities affects the psyche
adversely.[1]

Contents

 1Structure
o 1.1Shape
 2Function
o 2.1Emotion
o 2.2Perception and recognition of faces
 2.2.1Biological perspective
 3Society and culture
o 3.1Facial surgery
o 3.2Caricatures
o 3.3Metaphor
 4See also
 5References

Structure
The front of the human head is called the face. It includes several distinct areas,[3] of which the main
features are:

 The forehead, comprising the skin beneath the hairline, bordered

laterally by the temples and inferiorly by eyebrows and ears
 The eyes, sitting in the orbit and protected by eyelids and eyelashes
 The distinctive human nose shape, nostrils, and nasal septum
 The cheeks, covering the maxilla and mandibula (or jaw), the
extremity of which is the chin
 The mouth, with the upper lip divided by the philtrum, sometimes
revealing the teeth
Facial appearance is vital for human recognition and communication. Facial muscles in humans
allow expression of emotions.
The face is itself a highly sensitive region of the human body and its expression may change when
the brain is stimulated by any of the many human senses, such
as touch, temperature, smell, taste, hearing, movement, hunger, or visual stimuli.[4]
Shape
The nasal cartilages are important in defining the shape of the nose.

The muscles of the face are important when engaging in facial expressions.

Skeletal anatomy of the face

The face is the feature which best distinguishes a person. Specialized regions of the human brain,
such as the fusiform face area (FFA), enable facial recognition; when these are damaged, it may be
impossible to recognize faces even of intimate family members. The pattern of specific organs, such
as the eyes, or of parts of them, is used in biometric identification to uniquely identify individuals.
The shape of the face is influenced by the bone-structure of the skull, and each face is unique
through the anatomical variation present in the bones of
the viscerocranium (and neurocranium).[1] The bones involved in shaping the face are mainly
the maxilla, mandible, nasal bone and zygomatic bone. Also important are various soft tissues, such
as fat, hair and skin (of which color may vary).[1]
The face changes over time, and features common in children or babies, such as prominent buccal
fat-pads disappear over time, their role in the infant being to stabilize the cheeks during suckling.
While the buccal fat-pads often diminish in size, the prominence of bones increase with age as they
grow and develop.[1]
Facial shape is an important determinant of beauty, particularly facial symmetry.

Human face development, by Haeckel

Various face profiles as caricatures, by William Hogarth

A man's face
A woman's face

Function
Emotion
Faces are essential to expressing emotion, consciously or unconsciously. A frown denotes
disapproval; a smile usually means someone is pleased. Being able to read emotion in another's
face is "the fundamental basis for empathy and the ability to interpret a person’s reactions and
predict the probability of ensuing behaviors". One study used the Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Test[5] to attempt to determine how to measure emotion. This research aimed at using a measuring
device to accomplish what people do so easily everyday: read emotion in a face.[6]
The muscles of the face play a prominent role in the expression of emotion,[1] and vary among
different individuals, giving rise to additional diversity in expression and facial features.[7]

Variations of the risorius, triangularis and zygomaticus muscles.

People are also relatively good at determining if a smile is real or fake. A recent study looked at
individuals judging forced and genuine smiles. While young and elderly participants equally could tell
the difference for smiling young people, the "older adult participants outperformed young adult
participants in distinguishing between posed and spontaneous smiles".[8] This suggests that with
experience and age, we become more accurate at perceiving true emotions across various age
groups.
Perception and recognition of faces
Main article: Face perception

The face perceptionmechanisms of the brain, such as the fusiform face area, can produce
facial pareidolias such as this famous rock formation on Mars

Gestalt psychologists theorize that a face is not merely a set of facial features, but is rather
something meaningful in its form. This is consistent with the Gestalt theory that an image is seen in
its entirety, not by its individual parts. According to Gary L. Allen, people adapted to respond more to
faces during evolution as the natural result of being a social species. Allen suggests that the purpose
of recognizing faces has its roots in the "parent-infant attraction, a quick and low-effort means by
which parents and infants form an internal representation of each other, reducing the likelihood that
the parent will abandon his or her offspring because of recognition failure".[9] Allen's work takes a
psychological perspective that combines evolutionary theories with Gestalt psychology.
Biological perspective
Research has indicated that certain areas of the brain respond particularly well to faces.
The fusiform face area, within the fusiform gyrus, is activated by faces, and it is activated differently
for shy and social people. A study confirmed that "when viewing images of strangers, shy adults
exhibited significantly less activation in the fusiform gyri than did social adults".[10] Furthermore,
particular areas respond more to a face that is considered attractive, as seen in another study:
"Facial beauty evokes a widely distributed neural network involving perceptual, decision-making and
reward circuits. In those experiments, the perceptual response across FFA and LOC remained
present even when subjects were not attending explicitly to facial beauty".[11]

Society and culture

Facial surgery
Cosmetic surgery can be used to alter the appearance of the facial features.[12] Maxillofacial surgery
may also be used in cases of facial trauma, injury to the face and skin diseases. Severely disfigured
individuals have recently received full face transplants and partial transplants of skin and muscle
tissue.[13]
Caricatures
Caricatures often exaggerate facial features to make a face more easily recognized in association
with a pronounced portion of the face of the individual in question—for example, a caricature
of Osama bin Laden might focus on his facial hair and nose; a caricature of George W. Bush might
enlarge his ears to the size of an elephant's; a caricature of Jay Leno may pronounce his head and
chin; and a caricature of Mick Jagger might enlarge his lips. Exaggeration of memorable features
helps people to recognize others when presented in a caricature form.[14]
Metaphor
By extension, anything which is the forward or world-facing part of a system which has internal
structure is considered its "face", like the façade of a building. For example, a public
relations or press officer might be called the "face" of the organization he or she represents. "Face"
is also used metaphorically in a sociological context to refer to reputation or standing in society,
particularly Chinese society,[15] and is spoken of as a resource which can be won or lost. Because of
the association with individuality, the anonymous person is sometimes referred to as "faceless".

This section needs expansion. You

can help by adding to it. (August 2014)

See also
This article uses anatomical terminology; for an overview, see anatomical terminology.

Wikiquote has quotations

related to: Faces

Wikimedia Commons has

media related to face.

 Diprosopus  Physiognomy
 Face perception  Prosopagnosia
 Facial symmetry

References
1. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Moore, Keith L.; Dalley, Arthur F.; Agur, Anne M.
R. (2010). Moore's clinical anatomy. United States of America:
Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. pp. 843–980. ISBN 978-1-60547-652-0.
2. ^ "Year of Discovery, Faceless and Brainless Fish". 2011-12-29.
Retrieved December 11, 2013.
3. ^ Face | Define Face at Dictionary.com. Dictionary.reference.com.
Retrieved on 2011-04-29.
4. ^ Anatomy of the Face and Head Underlying Facial
Expression Archived 2007-11-29 at the Wayback Machine. Face-and-
emotion.com. Retrieved on 2011-04-29.
5. ^ Multimodal Emotion Recognition Test (MERT) | Swiss Center for
Affective Sciences Archived 2011-09-03 at the Wayback Machine.
Affective-sciences.org. Retrieved on 2011-04-29.
6. ^ Bänziger, T.; Grandjean, D. & Scherer, K. R. (2009). "Emotion
recognition from expressions in face, voice, and body: The Multimodal
Emotion Recognition Test (MERT)"(PDF). Emotion. 9 (5): 691–
 704. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.455.8892. doi:10.1037/a0017088. PMID 19803
591.
7. ^ Braus, Hermann (1921). Anatomie des Menschen: ein Lehrbuch für
Studierende und Ärzte. p. 777.
8. ^ Murphy, N. A.; Lehrfeld, J. M. & Isaacowitz, D. M.
(2010). "Recognition of posed and spontaneous dynamic smiles in
young and older adults". Psychology and Aging. 25 (4): 811–
821. doi:10.1037/a0019888. PMC 3011054. PMID 20718538.
9. ^ Allen, Gary L.; Peterson, Mary A.; Rhodes, Gillian (2006). "Review:
Seeking a Common Gestalt Approach to the Perception of Faces,
Objects, and Scenes". American Journal of Psychology. 119 (2): 311–
19. doi:10.2307/20445341. JSTOR 20445341.
10. ^ Beaton, E. A., Schmidt, L. A., Schulkin, J., Antony, M. M., Swinson,
R. P. & Hall, G. B. (2009). "Different fusiform activity to stranger and
personally familiar faces in shy and social adults". Social
Neuroscience. 4 (4): 308–
316. doi:10.1080/17470910902801021. PMID 19322727.
11. ^ Chatterjee, A.; Thomas, A.; Smith, S. E. & Aguirre, G. K. (2009).
"The neural response to facial
attractiveness". Neuropsychology. 23 (2): 135–
143. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.576.5894. doi:10.1037/a0014430. PMID 19254
086.
12. ^ Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery: MedlinePlus. Nlm.nih.gov. Retrieved
on 2011-04-29.
13. ^ Face Transplant Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital
14. ^ information about caricatures Archived 2007-08-26 at the Wayback
Machine. Edu.dudley.gov.uk. Retrieved on 2011-04-29.
15. ^ Ho, David Yau-fai (January 1976). "On the Concept of
Face". American Journal of Sociology. 81 (4): 867–
84. doi:10.1086/226145. JSTOR 2777600.: "The concept of face is, of
course, Chinese in origin".

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Human regional anatomy

 GND: 4020687-7
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