Couples have same face over years? Mystery Solved

Over Time, Will The Relationship Between Husband And Wife Become More And More Similar? A New Study Finally Solved This Mystery

The idea of ​​long-term contact between people has existed for decades. In fact, it originated from scientific experiments in the 1980s. But is this phenomenon really strange? Something?

This unusual idea entered the consciousness of the world in a psychology study published in 1987, which concluded that couples who have lived together for 25 years are physically similar to each other due to long-term cohabitation.

Regarding how this happened, the author, led by the late social psychologist Robert Zajonc, believes that “the apparently intimate relationship of a couple” can be attributed to the fact that Lovers for life are so synchronized with each other, thus unconsciously ending a tradition. The expressions of others will change the appearance of their faces over time.

Researchers believe that “one of the implications of the vascular emotion theory is that the habitual use of facial muscles will permanently affect the physical characteristics of the face.”

“This implication also shows that the facial features of two people who have lived together longer will become similar due to repeated empathy.”

Today, these ideas have been deeply ingrained in the psychological literature and daily culture. Some people think that this hypothetical phenomenon has been “scientifically proven.” But do you have one?

Research says

According to a new analysis by researchers at Stanford University, no, no.

“A careful study of the literature reveals that although the fusion hypothesis in appearance is one of the tenets of current psychology and has been widely disseminated through textbooks, books, and historical articles. A project led by Pin Pin Tea, a PhD student in electrical engineering The authors of the new study said: Makorn, in their article, there is no experimental support.

“[The 1987 experiment], despite being carefully designed, was based on a very small sample of 12 heterosexual couples. Furthermore, their results have never been repeated.”

In order to re-examine the so-called advantages of facial affinity, T- makorn and its co-author, computational psychologist Michal Kosinski, performed an iteration of the 1987 experiment, but the potential similarities are much greater, not to mention ability. . Technology of the 21st Century.

A 1987 study only examined photos of 12 couples after they got married and 25 years later, but this new study combined photos of 517 couples from public sources on the Internet, and compared photos between 20 and 69 years old shortly after marriage. Make a comparison. then. (All couples are white and heterosexual, and the researchers say they cannot obtain enough images of homosexual and non-white couples for meaningful analysis.)

Other Data

In addition, Tea-makorn and Kosinski not only have to compare human referees (153 people are recruiting online). But they also have a facial recognition algorithm called VGGFace2, which has previously been shown to be superior to humans in judging facial similarity.

In other words, perhaps this larger and more powerful experiment is the best opportunity to finally verify the hypothesis of physical convergence decades later.

Unfortunately, the researchers found no signs that the couple looked more and more similar over time, and they admitted that they were surprised by the results.

Tea-makorn said: “When we started this project, I firmly believed that we would easily find evidence of facial expression fusion”. “This is one of the theories that all college students learn in the same 101 lesson.”

Details

However, according to the similarity levels provided by human judges and the well-known VGGFace2, not only did the faces of couples. Become more similar over time, but also the human judges implied that the movement in the other direction was very slight (indicating that the faces of the couples It may actually become less). Similar, although the obvious difference is small).

However, although the research team had no evidence that the couple gradually liked each other, the results confirmed that people seemed to be choosing long-term partners similar to them, at least compared to other randomly selected faces.

“Consistent with previous research, we found evidence of homeopathy or trends.

The author wrote: “Based on previous research, we found evidence of symmetry, or the couple has a tendency to have similar faces.”

“The faces of the couple are similar, but they will not converge over time. This allows the appearance of the face to be in harmony with other characteristics (such as interest, personality, intelligence, attitude, values, and happiness) that show initial similarities , But will not converge over time.”

The results are reported in the scientific report.

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