Internalized Impressions: The Link Between Apparent Facial Trustworthiness and Deceptive Behavior Is Mediated by Targets' Expectations of How They Will Be Judged.

Researchers have debated whether a person's behavior can be predicted from his or her face. In particular, it is unclear whether people's trustworthiness can be predicted from their facial appearance. In the present study, we implemented conceptual and methodological advances in this area of inquiry, taking a new approach to capturing trustworthy behavior and measuring targets' own self-expectations as a mediator between consensual appearance-based judgments and the trustworthiness of targets' behavior. Using this novel paradigm to capture 900 observations of targets' behavior (as trustworthy or untrustworthy), we found that face-based judgments predicted trustworthiness. We also found that this effect was mediated by targets' expectations of how other people would perceive them and by their intentions to act in accordance with those expectations. These results are consistent with an internalized-impressions account: Targets internalize other people's appearance-based expectations and act in accordance with them, which leads facial-appearance-based judgments to be accurate.

Thin-slice judgments in the clinical context.

Clinicians make a variety of assessments about their clients, from judging personality traits to making diagnoses, and a variety of methods are available to do so, ranging from observations to structured interviews. A large body of work demonstrates that from a brief glimpse of another's nonverbal behavior, a variety of traits and inner states can be accurately perceived. Additionally, from these "thin slices" of behavior, even future outcomes can be predicted with some accuracy. Certain clinical disorders such as Parkinson's disease and facial paralysis disrupt nonverbal behavior and may impair clinicians' ability to make accurate judgments. In certain contexts, personality disorders, anxiety, depression, and suicide attempts and outcomes can be detected from others' nonverbal behavior. Additionally, thin slices can predict psychological adjustment to divorce, bereavement, sexual abuse, and well-being throughout life. Thus, for certain traits and disorders, judgments from a thin slice could provide a complementary tool for the clinician's toolbox.

Regulating emotions about secrets.

Secrecy is common and psychologically costly. Research shows that secrets have high emotional stakes, but no research has directly tested how people regulate their emotions about secrets. To fill this gap, we conducted an experimental study (Study 1), then moved to studying secrecy "in the wild" to capture regulatory processes as they unfold in everyday life (Studies 2 and 3). In Study 1 (N = 498), people reported using different strategies to regulate emotions about secrets compared to matched nonsecrets. In two daily diary studies (NStudy 2 = 174, 1,059 surveys; NStudy 3 = 240, 2,764 surveys), participants reported engaging in acceptance, distraction, and expressive suppression most-and social sharing least-to manage emotions about secrets. Moreover, in testing which kinds of secrets required most regulation, Study 3 suggested that significant, negative, controllable, and socially harmful secrets were associated with greater use of rumination, distraction, and suppression; perceived immorality of keeping secrets was associated with greater use of reappraisal; and secret discoverability did not differentially predict regulation strategies. Our findings indicate that when regulating emotions about their secrets, people appear to prioritize their intention to keep secret information hidden, despite potential well-being costs that may come with enacting this intention. Understanding the regulatory processes involved in secrecy is a foundation on which future research can build to identify ways of alleviating the burden of secrecy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Secrecy in Everyday Life.

Secrecy is common, yet we know little about how it plays out in daily life. Most existing research on secrecy is based on methods involving retrospection over long periods of time, failing to capture secrecy "in the wild." Filling this gap, we conducted two studies using intensive longitudinal designs to present the first picture of secrecy in everyday life. We investigated momentary contextual factors and individual differences as predictors of mind-wandering to and concealing secrets. Contextual factors more consistently predicted secrecy experiences than person-level factors. Feeling more negative about a secret predicted a greater likelihood of mind-wandering to the secret. Interacting with the secret target was linked with a greater likelihood of secret concealment. Individual differences were not consistently associated with mind-wandering to secrets. We conclude that daily experiences with secrets may be better predicted by momentary feelings rather than individual differences such as personality traits.

Nonverbal expressions of status and system legitimacy: an interactive influence on race bias.

A voluminous literature has examined how primates respond to nonverbal expressions of status, such as taking the high ground, expanding one's posture, and tilting one's head. We extend this research to human intergroup processes in general and interracial processes in particular. Perceivers may be sensitive to whether racial group status is reflected in group members' nonverbal expressions of status. We hypothesized that people who support the current status hierarchy would prefer racial groups whose members exhibit status-appropriate nonverbal behavior over racial groups whose members do not exhibit such behavior. People who reject the status quo should exhibit the opposite pattern. These hypotheses were supported in three studies using self-report (Study 1) and reaction time (Studies 2 and 3) measures of racial bias and two different status cues (vertical position and head tilt). For perceivers who supported the status quo, high-status cues (in comparison with low-status cues) increased preferences for White people over Black people. For perceivers who rejected the status quo, the opposite pattern was observed.

Emotion Appraisals and Coping with Secrets.

Secrecy is both common and consequential. Recent work suggests that personal experiences with secrets (i.e., mind-wandering to them outside of concealment contexts), rather than concealment (within conversations), can explain the harms of secrecy. Recent work has also demonstrated that secrecy is associated with emotions that center on self-evaluation-shame and guilt. These emotions may help explain the harms of secrecy and provide a point of intervention to improve coping with secrecy. Four studies with 800 participants keeping over 10,500 secrets found that shame surrounding a secret is associated with lower perceived coping efficacy and reduced well-being. Moreover, shifting appraisals away from shame improved perceptions of efficacy in coping with secrets, which was linked with higher well-being. These studies suggest that emotions surrounding secrets can harm well-being and highlight avenues for intervention.

The bright side of secrecy: The energizing effect of positive secrets.

Existing wisdom holds that secrecy is burdensome and fatiguing. However, past research has conflated secrecy with the kinds of adverse events that are often kept secret. As a result, it is unclear whether secrecy is inherently depleting, or whether these consequences vary based on the underlying meaning of the secret. We resolve this confound by examining the consequences of positive secrets. In contrast to the prior research, five experiments (N = 2,800) find that positive secrets increase feelings of energy, relative to (a) content-matched positive non-secrets, (b) other pieces of unknown positive information, and (c) other kinds of secrets. Importantly, these energizing effects of positive secrets were independent of positive affect. We further found that positive secrets are energizing because, compared to other kinds of secrets, people keep them for more intrinsically than extrinsically motivated reasons. That is, these secrets are more freely chosen, more consistent with personal values, and more motivated by internal desires (than by external pressures). Using both measures and manipulations of these motivations, we found that a motivational mechanism helps explain the energizing effect of positive secrets. The present results offer new insights into secrecy, how people respond to positive life events, and the subjective experiences of vitality and energy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Categorizing a Face and Facing a Category: The Constructive Impacts of Ambiguity and Uncertainty in Racial Categorization.

The past generation has seen a dramatic rise in multiracial populations and a consequent increase in exposure to individuals who challenge monolithic racial categories. We examine and compare two potential outcomes of the multiracial population growth that may impact people's racial categorization experience: (a) exposure to racially ambiguous faces that visually challenge the existing categories, and (b) a category that conceptually challenges existing categories (including "biracial" as an option in addition to the monolithic "Black" and "White" categories). Across four studies (N = 1,810), we found that multiple exposures to faces that are racially ambiguous directly lower essentialist views of race. Moreover, we found that when people consider a category that blurs the line between racial categories (i.e., "biracial"), they become less certain in their racial categorization, which is associated with less race essentialism, as well. Importantly, we found that these two effects happen independently from one another and represent two distinct cognitive processes.

A process model of having and keeping secrets.

Secrecy is a common and consequential human experience, and yet the literature lacks an integrative theoretical model that captures this broad experience. Whereas initial research focused on concealment (an action a person may take to keep a secret), recent literature documents the broader experience of having a secret. For instance, even if a secret is not being concealed in the moment, one's mind can still wander to thoughts of the secret with consequences for well-being. Integrating several disparate literatures, the present work introduces a new model of secrecy. Rather than define secrecy as an action (active concealment), the model defines secrecy as an intention to keep information unknown by one or more others. Like any other intention, secrecy increases sensitivity to internal or external cues related to the intention. Critically, secret-relevant thoughts are cued in one of two broad contexts: (a) during a social interaction that calls for concealment, and (b) the situations outside of those social interactions, where concealment is not required. Having a secret come to mind in these two very different situations evokes a set of distinct processes and outcomes. Concealment (enacting one's secrecy intention) predicts monitoring, expressive inhibition, and alteration, which consumes regulatory resources and may result in lower interaction quality. Mind-wandering to the secret (when concealment is not required) involves passively thinking about the content of the secret. Engagement with these thoughts may lead to repetitive thinking and rumination, reflection on how one feels about the secret, efforts to cope, or specific plans for how to handle the secret. The model brings together a number of literatures with implications for secrecy, identity concealment, relationships, mind-wandering, coping, health and well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Morality, punishment, and revealing other people's secrets.

Nine studies represent the first investigation into when and why people reveal other people's secrets. Although people keep their own immoral secrets to avoid being punished, we propose that people will be motivated to reveal others' secrets to punish them for immoral acts. Experimental and correlational methods converge on the finding that people are more likely to reveal secrets that violate their own moral values. Participants were more willing to reveal immoral secrets as a form of punishment, and this was explained by feelings of moral outrage. Using hypothetical scenarios (Studies 1, 3-6), two controversial events in the news (hackers leaking citizens' private information; Study 2a-2b), and participants' behavioral choices to keep or reveal thousands of diverse secrets that they learned in their everyday lives (Studies 7-8), we present the first glimpse into when, how often, and one explanation for why people reveal others' secrets. We found that theories of self-disclosure do not generalize to others' secrets: Across diverse methodologies, including real decisions to reveal others' secrets in everyday life, people reveal others' secrets as punishment in response to moral outrage elicited from others' secrets. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Revealing secrets.

We all keep secrets, and often to the detriment of our well-being. But what happens when we reveal a secret? This review integrates research on revealing secrets, from the perspective of both the revealer and the confidant. First, revealing secrets must be differentiated from other forms of social disclosure. Second, the decision of whether to share a secret is complex, and the benefits depend on the extent to which sharing elicits social support and insight. On the other side of the revelation, recent research demonstrates antecedents (e.g., certain personality traits) and outcomes (e.g., increased relational closeness) of being a confidant. Occasionally, people reveal others' secrets, the likelihood of which depends on factors such as the perceived immorality of the secret. While many open questions remain when it comes to revealing secrets, we highlight a growing understanding of the processes of secret sharing, both for those who confide and those who are confided in.

Mating interest improves women's accuracy in judging male sexual orientation.

People can accurately infer others' traits and group memberships across several domains. We examined heterosexual women's accuracy in judging male sexual orientation across the fertility cycle (Study 1) and found that women's accuracy was significantly greater the nearer they were to peak ovulation. In contrast, women's accuracy was not related to their fertility when they judged the sexual orientations of other women (Study 2). Increased sexual interest brought about by the increased likelihood of conception near ovulation may therefore influence women's sensitivity to male sexual orientation. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated women's interest in mating using an unobtrusive priming task (Study 3). Women primed with romantic thoughts showed significantly greater accuracy in their categorizations of male sexual orientation (but not female sexual orientation) compared with women who were not primed. The accuracy of judgments of male sexual orientation therefore appears to be influenced by both natural variations in female perceivers' fertility and experimentally manipulated cognitive frames.

Tough and tender: embodied categorization of gender.

Emerging evidence has shown that human thought can be embodied within physical sensations and actions. Indeed, abstract concepts such as morality, time, and interpersonal warmth can be based on metaphors that are grounded in bodily experiences (e.g., physical temperature can signal interpersonal warmth). We hypothesized that social-category knowledge is similarly embodied, and we tested this hypothesis by examining a sensory metaphor related to categorical judgments of gender. We chose the dimension of "toughness" (ranging from tough to tender), which is often used to characterize differences between males and females. Across two studies, the proprioceptive experience of toughness (vs. tenderness) was manipulated as participants categorized sex-ambiguous faces as male or female. Two different manipulations of proprioceptive toughness predictably biased the categorization of faces toward "male." These findings suggest that social-category knowledge is at least partially embodied.

Emotion contagion moderates the relationship between emotionally-negative families and abnormal eating behavior.

OBJECTIVE: To reconcile empirical inconsistencies in the relationship between emotionally-negative families and daughters' abnormal eating, we hypothesized a critical moderating variable: daughters' vulnerability to emotion contagion. METHOD: A nonclinical sample of undergraduate females (N = 92) was recruited via an advertisement and completed self-report measures validated for assessing: families' expressive negativity, daughters' susceptibility to emotion contagion, dietary restraint, and disinhibition, eating attitudes, and several control variables (interpersonal orientation, alexithymia, and the big five personality traits: extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism, and agreeableness). RESULTS: All variables and interactions were entered as predictors in a multistep multiple regression equation. Only an emotion contagion by family expressivity interaction term significantly predicted unhealthy eating attitudes (ß = .29, p = .02) and dietary restraint (ß = .27, p = .03). Negatively expressive families significantly induced unhealthy eating and restraint but only among young women susceptible to emotion contagion (ps < .05). DISCUSSION: Young women susceptible to emotion contagion may be at increased risk for eating disorders.

Identifying the dimensions of secrets to reduce their harms.

How does the content of secrets relate to their harms? We identified a data-driven model (across five empirical steps), which suggested that secrets are generally seen to differ in how immoral, relational, and profession/goal-oriented they are (Study 1). The more a secret was consensually perceived to be immoral, relational, and profession/goal-oriented, the more that secret was reported to evoke feelings of shame, social connectedness, and insight into the secret, respectively. These three experiences independently predicted the extent to which the secret was judged as harmful to well-being (Studies 2a-c and 3). Reciprocally, reminding participants of the ways in which a secret does not need to be harmful (i.e., across the three dimensions of secrets) bolstered participants' feelings of well-being and efficacy with regard to coping with that secret (Study 4). A final study that examined secrets from romantic partners replicated the effect on perceived coping efficacy, which in turn predicted daily indicators of relationship quality (Study 5). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The Primacy of Gender: Gendered Cognition Underlies the Big Two Dimensions of Social Cognition.

It is notable that across distinct, siloed, and disconnected areas of psychology (e.g., developmental, personality, social), there exist two dimensions (the "Big Two") that capture the ways in which people process, perceive, and navigate their social worlds. Despite their subtle distinctions and nomenclature, each shares the same underlying content; one revolves around independence, goal pursuit, and achievement, and the other revolves around other-focus, social orientation, and desire for connection. Why have these two dimensions emerged across disciplines, domains, and decades? Our answer: gender. We argue that the characteristics of the Big Two (e.g., agency/competence, communion/warmth) are reflections of psychological notions of masculinity and femininity that render gender the basis of the fundamental lens through which one sees the social world. Thus, although past work has identified the Big Two as a model to understand social categories, we argue that gender itself is the social category that explains the nature of the Big Two. We outline support for this theory and suggest implications of a gendered cognition in which gender not only provides functional utility for cognitive processing but simultaneously enforces gender roles and limits men and women's opportunities. Recognizing that the Big Two reflect masculinity and femininity does not confine people to act in accordance with their gender but rather allows for novel interventions to reduce gender-based inequities.

Thinking Through Secrets: Rethinking the Role of Thought Suppression in Secrecy.

Having secrets on the mind is associated with lower well-being, and a common view of secrets is that people work to suppress and avoid them-but might people actually want to think about their secrets? Four studies examining more than 11,000 real-world secrets found that the answer depends on the importance of the secret: People generally seek to engage with thoughts of significant secrets and seek to suppress thoughts of trivial secrets. Inconsistent with an ironic process account, adopting the strategy to suppress thoughts of a secret was not related to a tendency to think about the secret. Instead, adopting the strategy to engage with thoughts of a secret was related the tendency to think about the secret. Moreover, the temporal focus of one's thoughts moderated the relationship between mind-wandering to the secret and well-being, with a focus on the past exacerbating a harmful link. These results suggest that people do not universally seek to suppress their secrets; they also seek to engage with them, although not always effectively.

Shame, guilt, and secrets on the mind.

Recent work suggests that what is harmful about secrecy is not active concealment within social interactions but rather mind wandering to a secret outside of concealment contexts. However, it is not yet clear what predicts mind wandering to and concealing secrets. We proposed that emotional appraisals of shame and guilt for secrecy would predict how secrecy is experienced. Four studies with 1,000 participants keeping more than 6,000 secrets demonstrated that shame was linked with increased mind wandering to the secret. Guilt, in contrast, was linked with reduced mind wandering to the secret. The current work represents the first test of how emotions from secrecy determine how that secrecy is experienced. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Facial expressions of authenticity: Emotion variability increases judgments of trustworthiness and leadership.

People automatically generate first impressions from others' faces, even with limited time and information. Most research on social face evaluation focuses on static morphological features that are embedded "in the face" (e.g., overall average of facial features, masculinity/femininity, cues related to positivity/negativity, etc.). Here, we offer the first investigation of how variability in facial emotion affects social evaluations. Participants evaluated targets that, over time, displayed either high-variability or low-variability distributions of positive (happy) and/or negative (angry/fearful/sad) facial expressions, despite the overall averages of those facial features always being the same across conditions. We found that high-variability led to consistently positive perceptions of authenticity, and thereby, judgments of perceived happiness, trustworthiness, leadership, and team-member desirability. We found these effects were based specifically in variability in emotional displays (not intensity of emotion), and specifically increased the positivity of social judgments (not their extremity). Overall, people do not merely average or summarize over facial expressions to arrive at a judgment, but instead also draw inferences from the variability of those expressions.

The Solitude of Secrecy: Thinking About Secrets Evokes Goal Conflict and Feelings of Fatigue.

Past research has conceptualized secrecy as speech inhibition during social interaction. In contrast, the current research broadens the understanding of secrecy by conceptualizing it as the commitment to conceal information. Seven experiments demonstrate the implications of this broader conceptualization for understanding secrecy's consequences. The results demonstrate that thinking about secrets-relative to thinking about personal information unknown by others that is not purposefully concealed (i.e., undisclosed information)-indirectly increases the experience of fatigue by evoking feelings of isolation and a motivational conflict with one's affiliation goals. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the fatiguing effects of secrecy have consequences for task persistence and performance. Integrating theories of motivation, fatigue, and social isolation, we offer new directions for research on secrecy.