James Schirillo, PhD
James Schirillo, PhD, professor of psychology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is coauthor of a study published in Experimental Brain Research.
When someone whips out a camera and you slant your face to one side before saying “Cheese,” which side do you turn to?
The left or the right?
Decisions, decisions…
Researchers from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, found that this simple choice can impact how appealing you look to others.
And who doesn’t want to look more attractive?
So I called up the researchers to find out how we can all look our very best in photographs…
James Schirillo, PhD, a psychology professor at the university and a coauthor of the study, and his colleagues photographed smiling subjects from both the left and right. Then they created digital mirror images of each photo (so that you’re looking at what appears to be someone’s right cheek in the photo, but it’s actually his left cheek in real life, and vice versa). Both the original photos and mirror images were shown to viewers.
Viewers were asked to rate each photo on how aesthetically “pleasing” they thought it was, with “1” being least pleasing and “9” most pleasing. The viewers were also wearing an eye tracker, a gadget that measures the dilation of the pupil every 17 milliseconds. That’s because previous research has shown that our pupils dilate when we’re looking at an image that pleases us and constrict when we don’t like what we’re seeing. With this setup, the researchers were able to assess the viewers’ conscious and unconscious aesthetic reactions to the photos.
On average, by both measures, viewers were more likely to rate left-cheeked photos more appealing than right-cheeked photos. This was the case even when the images were digitally reversed—in other words, left-cheeked photos (even when they appeared to be right-cheeked photos) were still rated more pleasing than right-cheeked photos (even when they appeared to be left-cheeked photos). Pretty wild, huh?
As it turns out, Dr. Schirillo explained, there’s actually a physiological reason behind all of this. “The left side of your face is governed by the right hemisphere of your brain, which is the side that is mainly responsible for the expression of emotions,” he said. “So when someone is smiling and happy, it shows more on his/her left side.” (The same applies when we’re feeling sad or mad, so whenever you’re experiencing those emotions, show your right cheek if you want to hide it…or your left cheek if you want to let it all hang out!)
The greater expressiveness of the left side of your face holds true whether you’re right-handed or left-handed, Dr. Schirillo added. And all of that stuff about how the left side of the brain is associated with language and the right side of the brain is associated with math—that’s different, he said. This issue of showing emotions has to do with muscle control. “Each side of the brain controls the muscle groups on the opposite side of the face—around the mouth and cheeks, in particular,” said Dr. Schirillo.
The next time someone snaps a photo of you—maybe while you’re on vacation this summer—you might try putting your left cheek forward when you smile for the camera. This trick may also come in handy during other situations where you’d want to angle yourself better to make a good first impression, such as at a job interview…or on a first date!