Distrust before first sight? Examining knowledge- and appearance-based effects of trustworthiness on the visual consciousness of faces.

The present EEG study with 32 healthy participants investigated whether affective knowledge about a person influences the visual awareness of their face, additionally considering the impact of facial appearance. Faces differing in perceived trustworthiness based on appearance were associated with negative or neutral social information and shown as target stimuli in an attentional blink task. As expected, participants showed enhanced awareness of faces associated with negative compared to neutral social information. On the neurophysiological level, this effect was connected to differences in the time range of the early posterior negativity (EPN)-a component associated with enhanced attention and facilitated processing of emotional stimuli. The findings indicate that the social-affective relevance of a face based on emotional knowledge is accessed during a phase of attentional enhancement for conscious perception and can affect prioritization for awareness. In contrast, no clear evidence for influences of facial trustworthiness during the attentional blink was found.

First impressions of child faces: Facial trustworthiness influences adults' interpretations of children's behavior in ambiguous situations.

Despite the profound behavioral consequences that first impressions of trustworthiness have on adult populations, few studies have examined how adults' first impressions of trustworthiness influence behavioral outcomes for children. Using a novel task design, we examined adults' perceptions of children's behavior in ambiguous situations. After a brief presentation of a child's face (high trust or low trust), participants viewed the child's face embedded within an ambiguous scene involving two children (Scene Task) or read a vignette about a misbehavior done by that child (Misbehavior Task). In the Scene Task, participants described what they believed to be happening in each scene; in the Misbehavior Task, participants indicated whether the behavior was done on purpose or by accident. In both tasks, participants also rated the behavior of the target child and indicated whether that child would be a good friend. In Experiment 1, young adults (n = 61) and older adults (n = 57) viewed unaltered face images. In Experiment 2, young adults (N = 59) completed the same tasks while viewing images of child faces morphed toward high-trust and low-trust averages. In both experiments, ambiguous scenes and misbehaviors were interpreted more positively when the target child had a high-trust face versus a low-trust face, with comparable patterns of results for the two age groups. Collectively, our results demonstrate that a child's facial trustworthiness biases how adults interpret children's behavior-a heuristic that may have lasting behavioral consequences for children through a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Appearance-based trust processing in schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVES: Schizophrenia is characterized by impaired social interactions and altered trust. In the general population, trust is often based on facial appearance, with limited validity but enormous social consequences. The aim was to examine trust processing in schizophrenia and specifically to examine how people with schizophrenia use facial appearance as well as actual partner fairness to guide trusting decisions. DESIGN: An experimental economic game study. METHODS: Here, we tested how patients with schizophrenia and control participants (each N = 24) use facial trustworthiness appearance and partner fairness behaviour to guide decisions in a multi-round Trust Game. In the Trust Game, participants lent money to 'partners' whose facial appearance was either untrustworthy or trustworthy, and who either played fairly or unfairly. Clinical symptoms were measured as well as explicit trustworthiness impressions. RESULTS: Overall, the patients with schizophrenia showed unimpaired explicit facial trustworthiness impressions and unimpaired facial appearance biases in the Trust Game. Crucially, patients and controls significantly differed so that the patients with schizophrenia did not learn to discriminate in the Trust Game based on actual partner fairness, unlike control participants. CONCLUSION: A failure to discriminate trust has important implications for everyday functioning in schizophrenia, as forming accurate trustworthiness beliefs is an essential social skill. Critically, without relying on more valid trust cues, people with schizophrenia may be especially susceptible to the misleading effect of appearance when making trusting decisions. PRACTITIONER POINTS: Findings People with schizophrenia made very similar facial trustworthiness impressions to healthy controls and also used facial appearance to guide trust decisions similarly to controls. However, the patient group were less able to explicitly distinguish between fair and unfair partners based on their behaviour compared with the control group. Moreover, people with schizophrenia failed to use actual partner fairness to guide their financial decisions in the Trust Game, unlike controls, and this impairment was specific to a social task. People with schizophrenia may be particularly reliant on facial appearance when trusting others, as they may struggle to incorporate more valid trustworthiness information in their decision-making, such as actual partner fairness.

The cheek of a cheater: Effects of posing the left and right hemiface on the perception of trustworthiness.

Our cognitive mechanisms are designed to detect cheaters in social exchanges. However, cheater detection can be thwarted by a posed smile, which cheaters display with greater emotional intensity than cooperators. The present study investigated the role of hemifacial asymmetries in the perception of trustworthiness using face photographs with left and right cheek poses. Participants (N = 170) observed face photographs of cheaters and cooperators in an economic game. In the photographs, models expressed happiness or anger and turned slightly to the left or right to show their left or right cheeks to the camera. When the models expressed anger on their faces, cheaters showing the right cheek were rated as less trustworthy than cooperators (irrespective of cheeks shown) and cheaters showing the left cheek. When the models expressed happiness, trustworthiness ratings increased and did not differ between cheaters and cooperators, and no substantial asymmetries were observed. These patterns were replicated even when the face photographs were mirror-reversed. These results suggest that a cheater's fake smile conceals an uncooperative attitude that is displayed in the right hemiface, ultimately disguising cheater detection.

Relating Facial Trustworthiness to Antisocial Behavior in Adolescent and Adult Men.

Here, we investigate how facial trustworthiness-a socially influential appearance variable-interrelates with antisocial behavior across adolescence and middle adulthood. Specifically, adolescents who look untrustworthy may be treated with suspicion, leading to antisocial behavior through expectancy effects. Alternatively, early antisocial behaviors may promote an untrustworthy appearance over time (Dorian Gray effect). We tested these expectancy and Dorian Gray effects in a longitudinal study that followed 206 at-risk boys (90% White) from ages 13-38 years. Parallel process piecewise growth models indicated that facial trustworthiness (assessed from photographs taken prospectively) declined during adolescence and then stabilized in adulthood. Consistent with expectancy effects, initial levels of facial trustworthiness were positively related to increases in antisocial behavior during adolescence and also during adulthood. Additionally, higher initial levels of antisocial behavior predicted relative decreases in facial trustworthiness across adolescence. Adolescent boys' facial appearance may therefore both encourage and reflect antisocial behavior over time.

Group membership moderates the process of making trust judgments based on facial cues.

Trust is a foundation of interpersonal communication. Faces have a significant impact on trust judgments, and separate research demonstrates that group membership also influences trust judgments. However, it remains unclear whether and how group membership moderates the effect of face trustworthiness on trust judgments and investment decisions. In the present research, two experiments were conducted to explore the moderating effect of group membership (i.e., in-group vs. out-group) on perceptions of facial trustworthiness and trust judgments. Results showed that participants invested significantly more money on trials with trustworthy faces than trials with untrustworthy faces. Additionally, there was a significant interaction between group membership and facial trustworthiness; the investment difference between trustworthy faces and untrustworthy faces was greater for trials with in-group member faces than out-group member faces. These findings indicate that top-down and bottom-up cues jointly influence behavioral decisions.

Trustworthy faces make people more risk-tolerant: The effect of facial trustworthiness on risk decision-making under gain and loss conditions.

People can judge a stranger's trustworthiness at first glance solely based on facial appearance. Moreover, the trust behaviors people exhibit toward strangers differ depending on perceived trustworthiness from faces. Research has found that people have different risk preferences according to the gain or loss frame. Therefore, we hypothesized that the risk decisions are differently affected by facial trustworthiness in different frames. We conducted three experiments in which we asked participants to make risk decisions in the gain frame or loss frame. The results revealed that facial trustworthiness had a significant effect on risk decisions in the gain frame. However, the effect was attenuated in the loss frame. These results suggest that people are more willing to take risks in the gain frame if individuals look more trustworthy than those who look untrustworthy.

Age differences in facial trustworthiness perception are diminished by affective processing.

While perceptions of facial trustworthiness usually serve as our first references for social interactions, these impressions may ultimately turn out to be inaccurate or unreliable. Compared with younger adults, older adults generally face a higher risk of fraudulent exploitation; the characteristics of older adults' facial trustworthiness perception may play an important role in revealing the underlying mechanism of their being cheated. Previous studies have demonstrated that, in comparison with their younger counterparts, older adults tend to overestimate strangers' facial trustworthiness. In the present study, two experiments were conducted, aiming at testing (1) the age-related differences in facial trustworthiness perceptions (Experiment 1) and (2) whether any interventions (e.g., encouraging more deliberative processing or more affective processing) could be applied to help older adults reduce their tendency to overestimate trustworthiness, thus reducing their facial trustworthiness ratings to a lower level (Experiment 2). The results indicated that (1) consistent with previous studies, older adults provided higher trustworthiness ratings for unfamiliar faces than did younger adults (Experiment 1) and (2) more importantly, affective processing instead of deliberative processing could benefit older adults in their assessments of facial trustworthiness, leading them toward demonstrating similar-not significantly higher-levels of trust toward strange faces as younger adults (Experiment 2). A possible mechanism was offered, suggesting that affective processing might help older adults to detect negative cues in unfamiliar faces.

The dimensions underlying first impressions of older adult faces are similar, but not identical, for young and older adult perceivers.

First impressions based on facial cues have the potential to influence how older adults (OAs), a vulnerable population, are treated by others. The present study used a data-driven approach to examine dimensions underlying first impressions of OAs and whether those dimensions vary by perceiver age. In Experiment 1, young adult (YA) and OA participants provided unconstrained, written descriptions in response to OA faces. From these descriptors, 18 trait categories were identified that were similar, but not identical, across age groups. In Experiment 2, YA and OA participants rated OA faces on the trait words identified for their age group in Experiment 1. In separate principal components analyses, dimensions of sternness and confidence emerged for both groups. In Experiment 3, YA and OA participants rated these same faces on new words encompassing traits, emotion cues, and other appearance cues. Correlations between these ratings and factor scores showed that sternness is analogous to approachability for both age groups. Confidence is analogous to competence for both age groups and related to perceived age/health/attractiveness. Confidence was related to shyness for YAs but dominance for OAs. The current research has implications for a lifespan perspective on first impressions and informs functional accounts.

Age differences in facial trustworthiness judgement based on multiple facial cues.

Multiple facial cues such as facial expression and face gender simultaneously influence facial trustworthiness judgement in adults. The current work was to examine the effect of multiple facial cues on trustworthiness judgement across age groups. Eight-, 10-year-olds, and adults detect trustworthiness from happy and neutral adult faces (female and male faces) in Experiment 1. Experiment 2 included both adult and child faces wearing happy, angry, and neutral expressions. Nine-, 11-, 13-year-olds, and adults had to rate facial trustworthiness with a 7-point Likert scale. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that facial expression and face gender independently affected facial trustworthiness judgement in children aged 10 and below but simultaneously affected judgement in children aged 11 and above, adolescents, and adults. There was no own-age bias in children and adults. The results showed that children younger than 10 could not process multiple facial cues in the same manner as in older children and adults when judging trustworthiness. The current findings provide evidence for the stable-feature account, but not for the own-age bias account or the expertise account.

Viewing time and facial trustworthiness perception: Giving it a second thought may not work for older adults.

Older adults tend to rate unfamiliar faces higher on trustworthiness than do their younger counterparts. Although the saying goes "look before you leap", it is still unknown whether such a strategy could also apply to facial trustworthiness perception, and our understanding of the time course in facial trustworthiness perception also remains unclear. Here, we have argued that a cognitive controlled process suggested by "socioemotional selectivity theory" could potentially lead to such biased trustworthiness perception. Two experiments were conducted to test the association between viewing time and trustworthiness perception. The first study used hierarchical linear modeling in a sample of younger (N = 30, Mage  = 20.53, SD = 1.61, 50% female) and older (N = 30, Mage  = 63.27, SD = 3.14, 43% female) adults, and found that viewing time and trustworthiness evaluation were positively associated. Using the same stimuli, our second study further manipulated viewing time by two levels (500 ms vs. 3000 ms) and compared younger (N = 28, Mage  = 23.93, SD = 2.68, 50% female) and older (N = 30, Mage  = 64.47, SD = 4.32, 50% female) adults' facial trustworthiness evaluation. As expected, a significant three-way interaction revealed that viewing time only impacted older adults' facial trustworthiness evaluation, and only when given shorter viewing time did older adults show similar facial trustworthiness ratings as younger adults. The present study is the first to directly investigate the relationship between older adults' viewing time on unfamiliar faces and their perception of facial trustworthiness. Findings suggested that a second thought in facial perception may not benefit older adults' trustworthiness evaluation.

The effects of participants' sex and the facial trustworthiness of proposers on third-party decision-making in a dictator game.

This study investigated the effects of participants' sex and the facial trustworthiness of proposers on third-party decision-making. Sixty-three participants participated in this study. The participant's task was to act as an interest-free third party who observed a dictator game in which proposers with either trustworthy or untrustworthy faces made offers to recipients, to evaluate the reasonableness of the offers, and to express their intentions to punish the proposers. The results showed that offers from trustworthy proposers were rated as more reasonable than offers from untrustworthy proposers. Similarly, the participants were more likely to punish untrustworthy proposers than trustworthy proposers. In addition, there was a trend that male participants punished proposers more severely than female participants when proposers made unfair offers. These results demonstrate that an individual's facial trustworthiness affects other people's judgment and decisions.

Living in a Disadvantaged Neighborhood Affects Neural Processing of Facial Trustworthiness.

Neighborhood disorder (i.e., physical or social decay) is associated with decreased trust, which reinforces criminal behavior among some individuals in these communities. However, past research largely is descriptive and has not measured processes underlying trust. Using behavioral and neural indices [the late positive potential (LPP), a marker of salience elaboration] in a sample of adults (N = 55), we examined the association between perceived neighborhood disorder and facial trustworthiness perception as well as the potential moderating role of trustworthiness perception on the association between PND and criminal behavior. Individuals with higher perceived neighborhood disorder displayed less LPP differentiation between untrustworthy and trustworthy faces. Moreover, individuals with higher perceived neighborhood disorder and less LPP differentiation were less likely to commit a variety of crimes, whereas those with higher perceptions of neighborhood disorder and high LPP differentiation were more likely to commit a variety of crimes. Combined, these findings suggest that similarly processing trustworthy and untrustworthy faces, as indexed by less LPP differentiation, may reflect an adaptation among those with higher perceived neighborhood disorder that mitigates against deviant behavior and contacts with the law. Understanding the intersection between neighborhood characteristics and individual-level cognitive-affective processing may provide insight into what shapes beliefs and behaviors about important social information.

Outcome Evaluation Affects Facial Trustworthiness: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Facial trustworthiness and feedback information of trustees can influence trustors' investment behavior in trust games. This study investigated the temporal features of outcome evaluation (evaluation of feedback) and how they influence the processing of facial trustworthiness. A total of 25 college students participated in a decision-making task in which feedback was presented prior to a face stimulus. The decision of participants to continue investing was evaluated. We observed that trustors were more inclined to keep investing in trustworthy trustees or those appearing after positive feedback (gains). Event-related potential (ERP) results revealed that in the face presentation stage, trustworthy faces with losses induced more negative feedback-related negativity (FRN) than did trustworthy faces with gains and untrustworthy faces with losses. Further, faces that did not meet expectations induced more negative FRN. Trustworthy faces with gains induced more positive late positive component (LPC) than did trustworthy faces with losses and generated more motivated attention. Bottom-up and top-down processes were integrated for facial trustworthiness perception at different stages. In sum, top-down processing exerted a greater impact during the early stage of facial trustworthiness perception, both top-down and bottom-up processing were involved in the medium term, and bottom-up processing exerted a greater impact in the later stage.

Effects of Male Defendants' Attractiveness and Trustworthiness on Simulated Judicial Decisions in Two Different Swindles.

The present study aimed to examine the effects of male defendants' facial appearance (attractiveness and trustworthiness) on judicial decisions in two different swindles. We selected the following four categories of faces by manipulating facial attractiveness and trustworthiness simultaneously: the attractive and trustworthy face; the attractive but untrustworthy face; the unattractive but trustworthy face; and the unattractive and untrustworthy face. A total of six hundred and sixty-three participants across two studies were asked to make conviction-related judgments and penalty-related decisions for the defendants after they were randomly assigned to one of the four categories of faces. In Experiment 1, we used a blind-date swindle and found a "beauty penalty" for physically attractive defendants among females. Specifically, female participants were more likely to issue a guilty verdict to better-looking male defendants. Additionally, this "beauty-penalty effect" was merely observed in the untrustworthy condition. In Experiment 2, we used a telecommunication swindle, and the results showed that facial trustworthiness significantly predicted punishment magnitude and sentence decisions. Moreover, an exploratory analysis revealed that the disgust evoked by the faces partially mediated the relationship between facial trustworthiness and the assignment of criminal penalties. Taken together, these findings indicated that facial attractiveness and trustworthiness played different roles in judicial decisions. Importantly, the effect of facial attractiveness on judicial decisions differed as the detailed criminal circumstances of the offenses changed.

The Survival Processing Advantage of Face: The Memorization of the (Un)Trustworthy Face Contributes More to Survival Adaptation.

Researchers have found that compared with other existing conditions (e.g., pleasantness), information relevant to survival produced a higher rate of retrieval; this effect is known as the survival processing advantage (SPA). Previous experiments have examined that the advantage of memory can be extended to some different types of visual pictorial material, such as pictures and short video clips, but there were some arguments for whether face stimulus could be seen as a boundary condition of SPA. The current work explores whether there is a mnemonic advantage to different trustworthiness of face for human adaptation. In two experiments, we manipulated the facial trustworthiness (untrustworthy, neutral, and trustworthy), which is believed to provide information regarding survival decisions. Participants were asked to predict their avoidance or approach response tendency, when encountering strangers (represented by three classified faces of trustworthiness) in a survival scenario and the control scenario. The final surprise memory tests revealed that it was better to recognize both the trustworthy faces and untrustworthy faces, when the task was related to survival. Experiment 1 demonstrated the existence of a SPA in the bipolarity of facial untrustworthiness and trustworthiness. In Experiment 2, we replicated the SPA of trustworthy and untrustworthy face recognitions using a matched design, where we found this kind of memory benefits only in recognition tasks but not in source memory tasks. These results extend the generality of SPAs to face domain.

Should I trust you? Autistic traits predict reduced appearance-based trust decisions.

Facial impressions of trustworthiness guide social decisions in the general population, as shown by financial lending in economic Trust Games. As an exception, autistic boys fail to use facial impressions to guide trust decisions, despite forming typical facial trustworthiness impressions (Autism, 19, 2015a, 1002). Here, we tested whether this dissociation between forming and using facial impressions of trustworthiness extends to neurotypical men with high levels of autistic traits. Forty-six Caucasian men completed a multi-turn Trust Game, a facial trustworthiness impressions task, the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, and two Theory of Mind tasks. As hypothesized, participants' levels of autistic traits had no observed effect on the impressions formed, but negatively predicted the use of those impressions in trust decisions. Thus, the dissociation between forming and using facial impressions of trustworthiness extends to the broader autism phenotype. More broadly, our results identify autistic traits as an important source of individual variation in the use of facial impressions to guide behaviour. Interestingly, failure to use these impressions could potentially represent rational behaviour, given their limited validity.

Facial Likability and Smiling Enhance Cooperation, but Have No Direct Effect on Moralistic Punishment.

The present study serves to test how positive and negative appearance-based expectations affect cooperation and punishment. Participants played a prisoner's dilemma game with partners who either cooperated or defected. Then they were given a costly punishment option: They could spend money to decrease the payoffs of their partners. Aggregated over trials, participants spent more money for punishing the defection of likable-looking and smiling partners compared to punishing the defection of unlikable-looking and nonsmiling partners, but only because participants were more likely to cooperate with likable-looking and smiling partners, which provided the participants with more opportunities for moralistic punishment. When expressed as a conditional probability, moralistic punishment did not differ as a function of the partners' facial likability. Smiling had no effect on the probability of moralistic punishment, but punishment was milder for smiling in comparison to nonsmiling partners.

The Look that Binds: Partner-Directed Altruistic Motivation and Biased Perception in Married Couples.

A trustworthy appearance is regarded as a marker of a globally positive personality and, thus, evokes a host of benevolent responses from perceivers. Nevertheless, it is yet to be determined whether the reverse is also true, that is, whether social targets who evoke unambiguously benign motivations in perceivers are regarded as possessing a more trustworthy appearance (cf. Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008). To this end, elderly long-term married couples completed measures of partner-directed altruistic motivation, accommodative behaviors, marital satisfaction, and trust in the partner. They also completed a face-processing task involving spousal and stranger faces one year later. Higher motivation to prioritize a spouse's well-being (but none of the other relationship functioning variables assessed) predicted perceiving one's spouse's emotionally neutral face as being more trustworthy-looking. Results are discussed in the context of the reciprocal relationship between higher-order motivational processes and basic perceptual mechanisms in shaping relational climates.