Skin texture and colour predict perceived health in Asian faces

Facial skin texture and colour play an important role in observers' judgments of apparent health and have been linked to aspects of physiological health, including fitness, immunity and fertility. However, most studies have focused on Caucasian populations. Here, we report two studies that investigate the contribution of skin texture and colour to the apparent health ofMalaysian Chinese faces. In Study 1, homogenous skin texture, as measured by wavelet analysis, was found to positively predict ratings of apparent health of Asian faces. In study 2, homogenous skin texture and increased skin yellowness positively predicted rated health of Malaysian Chinese faces. This finding suggests that skin condition serves as an important cue for subjective judgements of health in Malaysian Chinese faces

Miscalibrations in judgements of attractiveness with cosmetics

Women use cosmetics to enhance their attractiveness. How successful they are in doing so remains unknown - how do men and women respond to cosmetics use in terms of attractiveness? There are a variety of miscalibrations where attractiveness is concerned - often, what one sex thinks the opposite sex finds attractive is incorrect. Here, we investigated observer perceptions about attractiveness and cosmetics, as well as their understanding of what others would find attractive. We used computer graphic techniques to allow observers to vary the amount of cosmetics applied to a series of female faces. We asked observers to optimize attractiveness for themselves, for what they thought women in general would prefer, and what they thought men in general would prefer. We found that men and women agree on the amount of cosmetics they find attractive, but overestimate the preferences of women and, when considering the preferences of men, overestimate even more. We also find that models' self-applied cosmetics are far in excess of individual preferences. These findings suggest that attractiveness perceptions with cosmetics are a form of pluralistic ignorance, whereby women tailor their cosmetics use to an inaccurate perception of others' preferences. These findings also highlight further miscalibrations of attractiveness ideals

Facial shape analysis identifies valid cues to aspects of physiological health in Caucasian, Asian and African populations

Facial cues contribute to attractiveness, including shape cues such as symmetry, averageness and sexual dimorphism. These cues may represent cues to objective aspects of physiological health, thereby conferring an evolutionary advantage to individuals who find them attractive. The link between facial cues and aspects of physiological health is therefore central to evolutionary explanations of attractiveness. Previously, studies linking facial cues to aspects of physiological health have been infrequent, have had mixed results, and have tended to focus on individual facial cues in isolation. Geometric morphometric methodology (GMM) allows a bottom-up approach to identifying shape correlates of aspects of physiological health. Here, we apply GMM to facial shape data, producing models that successfully predict aspects of physiological health in 272 Asian, African and Caucasian faces ? percentage body fat (21.0% of variance explained), body mass index (BMI; 31.9%) and blood pressure (BP; 21.3%). Models successfully predict percentage body fat and blood pressure even when controlling for BMI, suggesting that they are not simply measuring body size. Predicted values of BMI and BP, but not percentage body fat, correlate with health ratings. When asked to manipulate the shape of faces along the physiological health variable axes (as determined by the models), participants reduced predicted BMI, body fat and (marginally) BP, suggesting that facial shape provides a valid cue to aspects of physiological healthpublishersversionPeer reviewe

Retrieval of tropospheric water vapour from airborne far-infrared measurements: a case study

We describe studies undertaken in support of the Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring (FORUM) mission, ESA’s ninth Earth Explorer, designed to investigate whether airborne observations of far-infrared radiances can provide beneficial information on mid and upper tropospheric water vapour concentrations.Initially we perform a joint temperature and water vapour retrieval and show that the water vapour retrieval exploiting far-infrared measurements from the Tropospheric Airborne Fourier Transform Spectrometer (TAFTS) shows improvement over the a-priori Unified Model global forecast when compared to in situ dropsonde measurements. For this case the improvement is particularly noticeable in the mid-upper troposphere. Equivalent retrievals using mid-infrared radiances measured by the Airborne Research Interferometer Evaluation System (ARIES) show much reduced performance, with the degrees of freedom for signal (DFS), reduced by a factor of almost 2. Further sensitivity studies show that this advantage is decreased, but still present when the spectral resolution of the TAFTS measurements is reduced to match that of ARIES.The beneficial role of the far infrared for this case is further confirmed by performing water vapour only retrievals using ARIES and TAFTS individually, and then in combination. We find that the combined retrieval has a DFS value of 6.7 for water vapour, marginally larger than that obtained for the TAFTS retrieval and almost twice as large as that obtained for ARIES.These results provide observational support of theoretical studies highlighting the potential improvement that far-infrared observations could bring for the retrieval of tropospheric water vapour

Cross-cultural effects of color, but not morphological masculinity, on perceived attractiveness of men's faces

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ElsevierMuch attractiveness research has focused on face shape. The role of masculinity (which for adults is thought to be a relatively stable shape cue to developmental testosterone levels) in male facial attractiveness has been examined, with mixed results. Recent work on the perception of skin color (a more variable cue to current health status) indicates that increased skin redness, yellowness, and lightness enhance apparent health. It has been suggested that stable cues such as masculinity may be less important to attractiveness judgments than short-term, more variable health cues. We examined associations between male facial attractiveness, masculinity, and skin color in African and Caucasian populations. Masculinity was not found to be associated with attractiveness in either ethnic group. However, skin color was found to be an important predictor of attractiveness judgments, particularly for own-ethnicity faces. Our results suggest that more plastic health cues, such as skin color, are more important than developmental cues such as masculinity. Further, unfamiliarity with natural skin color variation in other ethnic groups may limit observers' ability to utilize these color cues

You Look Familiar: How Malaysian Chinese Recognize Faces

East Asian and white Western observers employ different eye movement strategies for a variety of visual processing tasks, including face processing. Recent eye tracking studies on face recognition found that East Asians tend to integrate information holistically by focusing on the nose while white Westerners perceive faces featurally by moving between the eyes and mouth. The current study examines the eye movement strategy that Malaysian Chinese participants employ when recognizing East Asian, white Western, and African faces. Rather than adopting the Eastern or Western fixation pattern, Malaysian Chinese participants use a mixed strategy by focusing on the eyes and nose more than the mouth. The combination of Eastern and Western strategies proved advantageous in participants' ability to recognize East Asian and white Western faces, suggesting that individuals learn to use fixation patterns that are optimized for recognizing the faces with which they are more familiar

Long-term airborne measurements of pollutants over the United Kingdom to support air quality model development and evaluation

The ability of regional air quality models to skilfully represent pollutant distributions throughout the atmospheric column is important to enabling their skilful prediction at the surface. This provides a requirement for model evaluation at elevated altitudes, though observation datasets available for this purpose are limited. This is particularly true of those offering sampling over extended time periods. To address this requirement and support evaluation of regional air quality models such as the UK Met Offices Air Quality in the Unified Model (AQUM), a long-term, quality-assured dataset of the three-dimensional distribution of key pollutants was collected over the southern United Kingdom from July 2019 to April 2022. Measurements were collected using the Met Office Atmospheric Survey Aircraft (MOASA), a Cessna 421 instrumented for this project to measure gaseous nitrogen dioxide, ozone, sulfur dioxide and fine-mode (PM2.5) aerosol. This paper introduces the MOASA measurement platform, flight strategies and instrumentation and is not intended to be an in-depth diagnostic analysis but rather a comprehensive technical reference for future users of these data. The MOASA air quality dataset includes 63 flight sorties (totalling over 150 h of sampling), the data from which are openly available for use. To illustrate potential uses of these upper-air observations for regional-scale model evaluation, example case studies are presented, which include analyses of the spatial scales of measured pollutant variability, a comparison of airborne to ground-based observations over Greater London and initial work to evaluate performance of the AQUM regional air quality model. These case studies show that, for observations of relative humidity, nitrogen dioxide and particle counts, natural pollutant variability is well observed by the aircraft, whereas SO2 variability is limited by instrument precision. Good agreement is seen between observations aloft and those on the ground, particularly for PM2.5. Analysis of odd oxygen suggests titration of ozone is a dominant chemical process throughout the column for the data analysed, although a slight enhancement of ozone aloft is seen. Finally, a preliminary evaluation of AQUM performance for two case studies suggests a large positive model bias for ozone aloft, coincident with a negative model bias for NO2 aloft. In one case, there is evidence that an underprediction in the modelled boundary layer height contributes to the observed biases at elevated altitudes.</p

InterFace : A software package for face image warping, averaging, and principal components analysis

We describe InterFace, a software package for research in face recognition. The package supports image warping, reshaping, averaging of multiple face images, and morphing between faces. It also supports principal components analysis (PCA) of face images, along with tools for exploring the “face space” produced by PCA. The package uses a simple graphical user interface, allowing users to perform these sophisticated image manipulations without any need for programming knowledge. The program is available for download in the form of an app, which requires that users also have access to the (freely available) MATLAB Runtime environment

Interaction of convective organisation with monsoon precipitation, atmosphere, surface and sea: the 2016 INCOMPASS field campaign in India

The INCOMPASS field campaign combines airborne and ground measurements of the 2016 Indian monsoon, towards the ultimate goal of better predicting monsoon rainfall. The monsoon supplies the majority of water in South Asia, but forecasting from days to the season ahead is limited by large, rapidly developing errors in model parametrizations. The lack of detailed observations prevents thorough understanding of the monsoon circulation and its interaction with the land surface: a process governed by boundary‐layer and convective‐cloud dynamics. INCOMPASS used the UK Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements (FAAM) BAe‐146 aircraft for the first project of this scale in India, to accrue almost 100 h of observations in June and July 2016. Flights from Lucknow in the northern plains sampled the dramatic contrast in surface and boundary‐layer structures between dry desert air in the west and the humid environment over the northern Bay of Bengal. These flights were repeated in pre‐monsoon and monsoon conditions. Flights from a second base at Bengaluru in southern India measured atmospheric contrasts from the Arabian Sea, over the Western Ghats mountains, to the rain shadow of southeast India and the south Bay of Bengal. Flight planning was aided by forecasts from bespoke 4 km convection‐permitting limited‐area models at the Met Office and India's NCMRWF. On the ground, INCOMPASS installed eddy‐covariance flux towers on a range of surface types, to provide detailed measurements of surface fluxes and their modulation by diurnal and seasonal cycles. These data will be used to better quantify the impacts of the atmosphere on the land surface, and vice versa. INCOMPASS also installed ground instrumentation supersites at Kanpur and Bhubaneswar. Here we motivate and describe the INCOMPASS field campaign. We use examples from two flights to illustrate contrasts in atmospheric structure, in particular the retreating mid‐level dry intrusion during the monsoon onset

Interaction of convective organisation with monsoon precipitation, atmosphere, surface and sea: the 2016 INCOMPASS field campaign in India

The INCOMPASS field campaign combines airborne and ground measurements of the 2016 Indian monsoon, towards the ultimate goal of better predicting monsoon rainfall. The monsoon supplies the majority of water in South Asia, but forecasting from days to the season ahead is limited by large, rapidly developing errors in model parametrizations. The lack of detailed observations prevents thorough understanding of the monsoon circulation and its interaction with the land surface: a process governed by boundary-layer and convective-cloud dynamics. INCOMPASS used the UK Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements (FAAM) BAe-146 aircraft for the first project of this scale in India, to accrue almost 100 hours of observations in June and July 2016. Flights from Lucknow in the northern plains sampled the dramatic contrast in surface and boundary layer structures between dry desert air in the west and the humid environment over the northern Bay of Bengal. These flights were repeated in pre-monsoon and monsoon conditions. Flights from a second base at Bengaluru in southern India measured atmospheric contrasts from the Arabian Sea, over the Western Ghats mountains, to the rain shadow of southeast India and the south Bay of Bengal. Flight planning was aided by forecasts from bespoke 4km convection-permitting limited-area models at the Met Office and India's NCMRWF. On the ground, INCOMPASS installed eddy-covariance flux towers on a range of surface types, to provide detailed measurements of surface fluxes and their modulation by diurnal and seasonal cycles. These data will be used to better quantify the impacts of the atmosphere on the land surface, and vice versa. INCOMPASS also installed ground instrumentation supersites at Kanpur and Bhubaneswar. Here we motivate and describe the INCOMPASS field campaign. We use examples from two flights to illustrate contrasts in atmospheric structure, in particular the retreating mid-level dry intrusion during the monsoon onset