Bushy eyebrows? You're likely to be a narcissist

Record ID: 1354072

  • Title: Bushy eyebrows? You're likely to be a narcissist
  • Date: 28th August 2018
  • Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM (JULY 24, 2017) (REUTERS) ****WARNING CONTAINS FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY*** VARIOUS OF ACTRESS AND MODEL CARA DELEVINGNE SIGNING AUTOGRAPHS AND POSING FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS PARIS, FRANCE (JULY 3, 2017) (REUTERS) BRITISH MODEL AND ACTRESS, CARA DELEVINGNE STANDING IN GROUP TALKING PARIS, FRANCE (FEBRUARY 27, 2018) (REUTERS) MARIA GRAZIA CHIURI BACKSTAGE
  • Embargoed: 11th September 2018 13:54
  • Keywords: Simon Cowell Cara Delevingne Face Russell Brand Eyes Kim Kardashian Narcissism Expression University Of Toronto Eyebrows Research
  • Location: TORONTO, CANADA, PARIS, FRANCE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES, LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM
  • City: TORONTO, CANADA, PARIS, FRANCE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES, LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM
  • Country: Canada
  • Topics: Life Sciences,Science
  • Reuters ID: LVA0028V3QZBV
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text:Cara Delevingne, Kim Kardashian and Russell Brand are among those well-known with well-defined and bushy eyebrows.
    But now researchers from the University of Toronto says that eyebrows are key to recognising how narcissistic someone is; and the bushier and more distinct the eyebrow, the more self-absorbed they're likely to be.
    Eyebrows are arguably the most expressive feature of the face, and helps people convey expressions such as happiness, anger, or confusion and they can also influence attractiveness.
    In a recent study, titled "Eyebrows cue grandiose narcissism", the researchers manipulated targets' eyebrows and measured how much it changed perceptions of narcissism. The results were published in the Journal of Personality.
    To do so, they first photographed a group of students with their faces kept neutral, and asked them to complete a narcissism test, called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory.
    The NPI asks people to choose from a series of statements (such as "If I ruled the world it would be a better place" or "the thought of ruling the world frightens me"), giving them a measure of how narcissistic they are.
    Then, another group of people were shown tightly cropped photos of those respondents in random order and were asked to judge how narcissistic they thought each person photographed was. The researchers used different formations of the photos, such as only showing the top half of the face, the bottom half of the face, just the eye region, just the eyebrows, among other arrangements.
    "Even when we flip their face upside down this way, people could still tell who was a narcissist and who wasn't, so that said to us that there must be some specific feature that's allowing people to perceive someone's narcissism," said University of Toronto associate professor Nicholas Rule. "From there we started looking at different parts of the face, so we looked at the top half of the face and the bottom half of the face. What we found was that people could make judgments of narcissism accurately from the top half, but not the bottom half. So this said to us, that's got to be in the top half of the face."
    The researchers then used a test that focussed just on the eye region and found that participants could accurately judge narcissism when viewing the eyes and eyebrows, but when eyebrows were removed, they could no longer detect narcissism.
    In other words, they weren't accurate in detecting narcissism when the eyebrows were covered, the researchers noted, suggesting that eyebrows play a critical role in perceptions of narcissism.
    "A lot happens in the eyes, the eyes are considered by some as the window to the soul right? And so what we did was show people photos of just the eyes, the eyes with the eyebrows, or just the eyebrows alone. And what we found when we did that, was that it was the eyebrows by themselves that people were using, to accurately judge if someone was narcissistic," said Rule.
    The study noted that perceivers looking at the eyebrows considered their femininity, grooming and distinctiveness when judging for narcissism, but only distinctiveness related to the accuracy of the judgment. That led the researchers to conclude that narcissists seem to have thicker and denser eyebrows.
    The researchers say future studies could consider how narcissism develops and is perceived.
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