Watch TV with a critical eye tonight and you will notice something very interesting. Ninety percent of the shots you see are people's heads. Not their full bodies--just heads-and-shoulders. Why is this? It's because television sets just cannot reproduce fine detail (nomatter what your salesman told you). So when a TV shot shows a full body, you can't really see the emotion of the person's face. You can't tell if the subject is happy or sad or bored or sick--unless you see the individual's face. So television programs emphasize faces. Soaps show faces a bit more, action dramas a bit less, but the principle remains.

What about HD? Does the increased detail of high definition TV minimize the need to emphasize faces? Not really. While it’s true that a 50-inch HD screen can mitigate the problem described above, most people don’t have such a fancy setup. And even if they did, humans still prefer to look at other human faces.