14 DAY TRIAL // The pursuit of eternal youth is something we do every day, whether we put on a facial cream, go to the beauty salon, put some make-up on or simply dress better, and these past years, the difference between men and women in their care for the way they look, has decreased.
But to think you look good, or younger for that matter, is just not enough – others must see you this way too; basically, people's perception of us, makes us look in a certain way.
So what exactly are you supposed to do to look significantly younger, and not be forced to undergo plastic surgery?
Jena University (Germany) psychologists, found that the answer was actually very simple: if you want to look younger, you should surround yourself with people older than you, and others will perceive you much younger than you really are.
The researchers discovered that if people see faces of older people, before that of a 30-year-old, they will estimate his/her age to be much younger than in reality.
Dr. Holger Wiese, a psychologist at the Jena University, says that “people are actually quite good at guessing the age of the person next to them.”
He is responsible for one of the six projects led by Professor Dr. Stefan R. Schweinberger, in the DFG-sponsored research unit 'Person Perception'.
The research team used modern digital image editing techniques and a data bank of faces with no make-up on and with distracting elements having been touched up.
In the first study, the participants were students, and in a second one (unpublished yet), age estimations were made by elderly people.
In the experiment, if participants saw many faces of elderly people, and then a test face of a middle-aged person, they would estimate this person as significantly younger.
On the other hand, when participants looked at younger faces and then at a middle-aged test face, they estimated it as being considerably older.
The participants were actually systematically wrong in their estimations, after looking intensely and adapting to a certain age group, and Schweinberger explained that “these effects occur independently of the viewer's age and sex.”
The study had a second result, which showed that when adaptor faces and test faces showed people of the same sex, the after-effects of age perception were even stronger.
This actually suggests that the perception of age and sex in faces is not a totally independent process.
You might say that these findings have a certain logic, so there's no real surprise there, but many opinions of experts have just been contradicted by this research.
“We are able to change the subjective perception of a face,” even though nobody knows though how long this effect lasts, said Stefan Schweinberger.
Holger Wiese added that “the age of the person next to you is one of the most important characteristics for our perception of other people.
“This leads to exciting crossovers into other areas of scientists who are dealing with the interactions of social groups.”
These findings are published in the scientific journal Vision Research.
