First impressions are not last impressions

Do you judge a person just by looking at his/her photo and repent later when your expectations are not fulfilled?

Researchers have now found that first impressions may be misleading as different first impressions develop depending on how an individual face is viewed.

"Our findings suggest that impressions from still photos of individuals could be deeply misleading," says psychological scientist Alexander Todorov of Princeton University in the US.

For the study, researchers asked participants in an online survey to view and rate target faces on various characteristics, including attractiveness, competence, creativity, cunning, extraversion, meanness, trustworthiness or intelligence.

They found that different images of the same individual led to noticeably varied first impressions.

"The face is not a still image frozen in time but rather a constantly shifting stream of expressions that convey different mental states," the researchers noted.

The study appeared in the journal Psychological Science.