Face Alterity

The face is a central sense organ complex, for those animals that have one, normally on the ventral surface of the head, and can, depending on the definition in the human case, include the hair, forehead, eyebrow, eyelashes, eyes, nose, ears, cheeks, mouth, lips, philtrum, temple, teeth, skin, and chin.^[1] The face has uses of expression, appearance, and identity amongst others. It also has different senses like olfaction, taste, hearing, and vision.^[2]

Face
A portrait of a human face (Mona Lisa)
Latin	facia/facies

The face is the feature which best distinguishes a person. There are "special" regions of the human brain, such as the fusiform face area (FFA), which when damaged prevent the recognition of the faces of even intimate family members. The pattern of specific organs such as the eyes or parts thereof are used in biometric identification to uniquely identify individuals.

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, 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".

The face perception mechanisms of the brain, such as the fusiform face area, can produce facial pareidolias such as in images of Libya Montes (left) and Cydonia (right, Mars)

Cosmetic surgery can be used to alter the appearance of the facial features.^[3] Plastic surgery may also be used in cases of facial trauma, injury to the face. Severely disfigured individuals have recently received full face transplants and partial transplants of skin and muscle tissue.

Caricatures often exaggerate facial features to make a face more easily recognised 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 recognise others when presented in a caricature form.^[4]

Various face profiles as caricature

Gestalt psychologists theorise 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".^[5] Allen's work takes a psychological perspective that combines evolutionary theories with Gestalt psychology.

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^[6] 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.^[7]
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.

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".^[9] 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".^[10]



Alterity is a philosophical term meaning "otherness", strictly being in the sense of the other of two (Latin alter). In the phenomenological tradition it is usually understood as the entity in contrast to which an identity is constructed, and it implies the ability to distinguish between self and not-self, and consequently to assume the existence of an alternative viewpoint. The concept was established by Emmanuel Lévinas in a series of essays, collected under the title Alterity and Transcendence (1999[1970]).
The term is also deployed outside of philosophy, notably in anthropology by scholars such as Nicholas Dirks, Johannes Fabian, Michael Taussig and Pauline Turner Strong to refer to the construction of "cultural others". The term has gained further use in seemingly somewhat remote disciplines, e.g. historical musicology where it is effectively employed by John Michael Cooper in a study of Goethe and Mendelssohn