From the time we our born, our personalities are manifesting in 24/7 (even while sleeping) facial expressions. These mappings persist and leave imprints on our faces as we grow. Thus the shape of our face on the outside is indicative of shaping on the inside.

You can infer this natural kind of "imprinting" by artifical imprinting.

There are societies that place rings around their necks during childhood so as to inspire the elongation of the neck. In China, they used to keep women's feet wrapped in tight shoes to shrink the feet. And those in wheelchairs during childhood retain small legs. Persistent constraints during ontogeny (The origin and development of an individual organism from embryo to adult) determine what the adult will look like.

Our personalities have an arc of concresence that slows to a snail's pace by the time we're 16. From the time we are born to that point, our facial expressions are constantly constraining the growth of tissues on our faces. Our faces are born with some clay, but then molded by our constant facial gestures. Eventually, you can read someone's face directly to get a sense of their personality.

I was reading that they were able to get a computer to detect facial expressions and identify emotions on humans. Well, maybe this is the missing link in the AI chain. What they could do is hookup the emotion reader to a subject who interacts with a text-bot. Then, it should read the emotions as the conversations progress, learning and understanding patterns between certain conversaitonal directions or sentences and emotions that are evoked. After the computer is trained to connect conservational bits with emotion, it could then seek to create an emotion in the other person, try to push them toward positive and happy responses. Bam, the artificial counselor. The program could also learn to associate emotion that he should feel as a counselor depending on how the conversation is going. And then his goal should be to improve his emotion (which could be tied, partially, to whether the other person is feeling emotion). Heck, I bet there's some psychological map in two-person scenarios that could be programmed in there.

Eh? eh? what do you think?

Can you read a face? "Oh come on Phil, don't be superficial, don't judge a book by its cover." Yeah, yeah, but we DO read faces all the time. An Aryan femme fatale is walking idyllically around and a grumpy/disheveled looking old man, let's say, like some punk Chomsky comes around. He says, "Miss, could you point me to the nearest Museum of Post-Modern Art." Ms. Fatale, upon a split-second processing of Mr. Fomsky, scurries off, kind of pissed. Then, later that same night, a chiseled Kennedy-faced frat boy offers Ms. Marilyn a "special" drink. She accepts, and is worse off with the Kennedy.

Wait? That shows that she read the face, but read poorly, so didn't really read at all. But, I digress (always wanted to say that). No really, I think you can read a face. I look around, and I see certain faces and besides the initial pre-judgment that I'm programmed to eject, I start to think. I think, "Looking at this face, there's just certain things that this man just cannot express." Things such as a giggle + bawl. Or what about a sly smirk + resigned brooding. Or what about coyness + arrogance. Just some faces can NEVER express certain things. Some people have never said certain things or experienced certain feelings. The older they get, the more their face molds itself to suit whatever it has consistently communicated. After a while, it appears to cement so that the face limits the range of its expression to precisely what its owner habitually expresses.

In High School, it was more difficult to make such quick conclusions. Our faces were still fresh clay, waiting to specialize into the annoying pigeon holes of expression that we were waddling into. Hence, maybe that's why it's easier to mistake certain people for certain characters when they're younger, while as older people you can easily bubble-sort.