What shape is a gay face

This "gaydar" isn't infallible: The rate of correct guesses is usually in the high 50 percent to mid percent range, Tabak said. Looking at faces upside down is known to mess up people's processing of how faces fit together. But even upside down, people are good at processing individual facial features.

Shape differences between the

A pair of science educators recently dissected the research behind 'gay face', what it looks like, what might causes it and some of the potential problems it could cause. He and his colleagues are now using brain imaging to monitor brain activity as people look at pictures of gay and straight individuals without knowing their sexual orientation.

The results will help clarify whether these shape judgments are automatic, much like the judgments we make about people's gender. People can judge with surprising accuracy whether someone is gay or straight — even when they're looking at a black-and-white photograph, cropped of hair and identifying marks, and presented upside down.

Tabak and his co-author exploited this quirk of the brain by presenting photographs of gay men, straight men, 87 gay women and 93 straight women to student volunteers. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter livescience and on Facebook.

Some of the students saw upside-down faces, gay cumpilatio others were shown the faces right-side up. In one popular optical illusion called the Thatcher effectit's tough to tell even when the eyes or mouth are flipped the wrong way around in an upside-down face.

The face shapes of homosexual men were deemed more masculine on this scale, and raters were unable to correctly identify each participants sexual orientation just from looking at their face. An academic review of the work would point out that every image shown is of a white person’s face, despite the report’s claims to make universal observations about “gay face”.

One study that the duo mention was a research project wherein scientists used software to map the physical structure of faces. The more exaggerated the gay features were, the more likely the volunteers were to think that person was gay.

Moffit says the results suggest that “gay-face” is more of a spectrum, rather than. Or it could be some combination of both. What earlier studies had not done was to tease out how face make these snap sexuality judgments.

There were fewer "false alarms" than when looking at men, Tabak said, meaning instances when a straight person was judged gay. Tabak's is not the first study to find that people can correctly guess a person's sexual orientation from a photograph more often than just by chance.

In either case, the black-and-white cropped photos were presented for only 50 milliseconds. What does ‘gay face’ mean? When looking at upside-down faces, people were still able to guess their sexual orientation correctly at rates better than chance — although not quite as accurately as when the faces were right-side up.

That suggests both facial features which can be processed in upside-down and right-side-up photos and facial configuration provide hints gay orientation, the researchers report Wednesday May 16 in the journal PLoS ONE.

It remains to be seen how or if people use "gaydar" in real life, when they have more to go on than a glimpse of a photograph, Tabak said. As in previous studies, people were better than chance at guessing whether the faces belonged to gay or straight people.

They found that people were better at judging women correctly. In a first for studies of this kind, the researchers were able to directly compare how people did when judging the sexual orientation of men versus women. The findings from a University of Washington study suggest people use a combination of clues from individual facial features and from the way those features fit what to make snap judgments about sexual orientationsaid researcher Joshua Tabak, a graduate student in psychology.

They might base it on individual facial features — nose or eyes — or they might look at how the features fit together in the face, such as how far apart the eyes are. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association.

Still, that's pretty impressive, he said, given that researchers use cropped faces without hair, jewelry or other possible hints about sexual orientation. Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior.