Looking beyond the face: a training to improve perceivers' impressions of people with facial paralysis

Abstract

Objective: Healthcare providers and lay people alike tend to form inaccurate first impressions of people with facial movement disorders such as facial paralysis (FP) because of the natural tendency to base impressions on the face. This study tested the effectiveness of the first interpersonal sensitivity training for FP.

Methods: Undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to one of two training conditions or an untrained control. Education raised awareness about FP symptoms and experiences and instructed participants to form their impressions based on cues from the body and voice rather than the face. Education+feedback added feedback about the correctness of participants' judgments. Subsequently, participants watched 30s video clips of people with FP and rated their extraversion.

Results: Participants' bias and accuracy in the two training conditions did not significantly differ, but they were significantly less biased than controls. Training did not improve the more challenging task of accurately detecting individual differences in extraversion.

Conclusion: Educating people improves bias, but not accuracy, of impressions of people with FP.

Practice implications: Information from the education condition could be delivered in a pamphlet to those likely to interact with this population such as healthcare providers and educators.

Keywords: Accuracy; Facial movement disorders; Facial paralysis; Interpersonal perception; Interpersonal sensitivity training.

Figure 1

Effect of training and severity on perceivers’ bias in rating extraversion of targets with FP. Error bars represent standard errors. Horizontal line represents targets’ mean self-reported extraversion (M = 4.50, SE = 0.36).