The BFD consists of photographs of 18 male and 22 female undergraduate students from the University of Basel with an average age of 23 years. The individuals look directly towards the camera with a neutral, relaxed facial expression.

All 40 photographs have been systematically manipulated to show reduced or enhanced values on the Big Two (agency and communion) and on the Big Five (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and extraversion) personality dimensions. This results in a total of 15 images per individual, and 600 images in total.

The validation file contains means and standard deviations of the Big Two and Big Five personality judgments as well as naturalness judgements for all 600 images.

Update 2023/05/17:
A subset of 30 photographs manipulated to show reduced and enhanced values on risk taking has been integrated into the database.