Facial impressions of dominance: Exploring the construct’s factor structure in young French adults

Humans readily infer other’s social traits from their facial features. Such first impressions from faces were found to be organized in 2 major dimensions, valence and dominance. The goal of the present study was to explore the structure of the construct of dominance. Five brain-storming sessions and judges’ evaluation technique were employed in order to identify judgements of dominance/submissiveness from faces in young French adults. A Likert-scale questionnaire including 64 items was established. Using principal component and exploratory factor analysis, 2- and 3-component/factor solutions were extracted from data of 191 French adults having rated a randomly selected face photograph. Component/factor solutions are compared and their viability is discussed.