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So we certainly can judge people in their pictures by examining factors such as whether the person is smiling or frowning. These factors have been investigated previously in studies. However, one another important factor: the distance between the photographer and the subject, had never been investigated up until now.

A new study, that focused on the same, by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), suggests that the distance between the photographer and the subject does make a huge difference. According to the findings of the current study, when a subject is closer to the camera, he/she seems to look less trustworthy, less competent, and less attractive.

Pietro Perona, the Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech, is the brain behind the idea for the study, and in collaboration with Ralph Adolphs, Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of biology, and CNS graduate student Ronnie Bryan (PhD '12), Perona set out to gather opinions on 36 photographs representing two different images of 18 individuals. While one of the images was taken at close range and the second was taken at a distance of about seven feet, Medical Xpress reported.

"It turns out that faces photographed quite close-up are geometrically warped, compared to photos taken at a larger distance," explains Bryan. "Of course, the close picture would also normally be larger, higher resolution and have different lighting-but we controlled for all of that in our study. What you're left with is a warping effect that is so subtle that nobody in our study actually noticed it. Nonetheless, it's a perceptual clue that influenced their judgments."

It was found that subtle distance did make a big difference. While pictures taken from a close-up made people look less trustworthy, the participants also judged close-up photo subjects as less attractive and competent.

"This was a surprising, and surprisingly reliable, effect," says Adolphs. "We went through a bunch of experiments, some testing people in the lab, and some even over the Internet; we asked participants to rate trustworthiness of faces, and in some experiments we asked them to invest real money in unfamiliar people whose faces they saw as a direct measure of how much they trusted them."

Adolph further said that the result was found to be the same across all of the studies. The two distances at which the photographs had been taken were two feet, (when a person looked untrustworthy) and seven feet. These two distances were specifically chosen by the researchers since one is within, and the other outside of, personal space.

Some pictures were also digitally warped by the researchers to artificially manipulate how trustworthy they would appear.

"Once you know the relation between the distance warp and the trustworthiness judgment, you could manipulate photos of faces and change the perceived trustworthiness,'' notes Perona.

The researchers are now planning to build on these findings, using machine-vision techniques-technologies that can automatically analyze data in images.

"The work might also allow us to estimate the perceived trustworthiness of a particular face image," says Perona. "You could imagine that many people would be interested in such applications-particularly in the political arena."