Abnormalities in early visual processes are linked to hypersociability and atypical evaluation of facial trustworthiness: An ERP study with Williams syndrome

Accurate assessment of trustworthiness is fundamental to successful and adaptive social behavior. Initially, people assess trustworthiness from facial appearance alone. These assessments then inform critical approach or avoid decisions. Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) exhibit a heightened social drive, especially toward strangers. This study investigated the temporal dynamics of facial trustworthiness evaluation in neurotypic adults (TD) and individuals with WS. We examined whether differences in neural activity during trustworthiness evaluation may explain increased approach motivation in WS compared to TD individuals. Event-related potentials were recorded while participants appraised faces previously rated as trustworthy or untrustworthy. TD participants showed increased sensitivity to untrustworthy faces within the first 65–90 ms, indexed by the negative-going rise of the P1 onset (oP1). The amplitude of the oP1 difference to untrustworthy minus trustworthy faces was correlated with lower approachability scores. In contrast, participants with WS showed increased N170 amplitudes to trustworthy faces. The N170 difference to low–high-trust faces was correlated with low approachability in TD and high approachability in WS. The findings suggest that hypersociability associated with WS may arise from abnormalities in the timing and organization of early visual brain activity during trustworthiness evaluation. More generally, the study provides support for the hypothesis that impairments in low-level perceptual processes can have a cascading effect on social cognition.     

Seeing is believing: Trustworthiness as a dynamic belief

Recent efforts to understand the mechanisms underlying human cooperation have focused on the notion of trust, with research illustrating that both initial impressions and previous interactions impact the amount of trust people place in a partner. Less is known, however, about how these two types of information interact in iterated exchanges. The present study examined how implicit initial trustworthiness information interacts with experienced trustworthiness in a repeated Trust Game. Consistent with our hypotheses, these two factors reliably influence behavior both independently and synergistically, in terms of how much money players were willing to entrust to their partner and also in their post-game subjective ratings of trustworthiness. To further understand this interaction, we used Reinforcement Learning models to test several distinct processing hypotheses. These results suggest that trustworthiness is a belief about probability of reciprocation based initially on implicit judgments, and then dynamically updated based on experiences. This study provides a novel quantitative framework to conceptualize the notion of trustworthiness.     

Facial and self‐report questionnaire measures capture different aspects of romantic partner preferences

Romantic relationship researchers often use self‐report measures of partner preferences based on verbal questionnaires. These questionnaires show that partner preferences involve an evaluation in terms of underlying factors of vitality–attractiveness, status‐resources, and warmth–trustworthiness. However, when people first encounter a potential partner, they can usually derive a wealth of impressions from their face, and little is known about the relationship between verbal self‐reports and impressions derived from faces. We conducted four studies investigating potential parallels and differences between facial impressions and verbal self‐reports. Study 1 showed that when evaluating highly variable everyday face images in a context that does not require considering them as potential partners, participants can reliably perceive the traits and factors that are related to partner preferences. However, despite being capable of these nuanced evaluations, Study 2 found that when asked to evaluate images of faces as potential romantic partners, participants’ preferences become dominated by attractiveness‐related concerns. Study 3 confirmed this dominance of facial attractiveness using morphed face‐like images. Study 4 showed that attractiveness dominates partner preferences for faces even when task instructions imply that warmth–trustworthiness or status–resources should be of primary importance. In contrast to verbal questionnaire measures of partner preferences, evaluations of faces focus heavily on attractiveness, whereas questionnaire self‐reports tend on average to prioritize warmth–trustworthiness over attractiveness. Evaluations of faces and verbal self‐report measures therefore capture different aspects of partner preferences.     

The influence of postural emotion cues on implicit trait judgements

Perceptions of others’ traits (e.g., trustworthiness or dominance) are influenced by the emotion displayed on their face. For instance, the same individual appears more trustworthy when they express happiness than when they express anger. This overextension of emotional expressions has been shown with facial expression but whether this phenomenon also occurs when viewing postural expressions was unknown. We sought to examine how expressive behaviour of the body would influence judgements of traits and how sensitivity to this cue develops. In the context of a storybook, adults (N?=?35) and children (5 to 8 years old; N?=?60) selected one of two partners to help face a challenge. The challenges required either a trustworthy or dominant partner. Participants chose between a partner with an emotional (happy/angry) face and neutral body or one with a neutral face and emotional body. As predicted, happy facial expressions were preferred over neutral ones when selecting a trustworthy partner and angry postural expressions were preferred over neutral ones when selecting a dominant partner. Children’s performance was not adult-like on most tasks. The results demonstrate that emotional postural expressions can also influence judgments of others’ traits, but that postural influence on trait judgments develops throughout childhood.

     

Older adults’ neural activation in the reward circuit is sensitive to face trustworthiness

We examined older adult (OA) and younger adult (YA) neural sensitivity to face trustworthiness in reward circuit regions, previously found to respond to trustworthiness in YA. Interactions of face trustworthiness with age revealed effects exclusive to OA in the amygdala and caudate, and an effect that was not moderated by age in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). OA, but not YA, showed a nonlinear amygdala response to face trustworthiness, with significantly stronger activation response to high than to medium trustworthy faces, and no difference between low and medium or high. This may explain why an earlier study investigating OA amygdala activation to trustworthiness failed to find a significant effect, since only the linear low versus high trustworthiness difference was assessed. OA, but not YA, also showed significantly stronger activation to high than to low trustworthy faces in the right caudate, indicating a positive linear effect, consistent with previous YA research, as well as significantly stronger activation to high than to medium but not low trustworthy faces in the left caudate, indicating a nonlinear effect. Activation in dACC across both age groups showed a positive linear effect consistent with previous YA research. Finally, OA rated the faces as more trustworthy than did YA across all levels of trustworthiness. Future research should examine whether the null effects for YA were due to our inclusion of older faces. Research also should investigate possible implications of our findings for more ecologically valid OA responses to people who vary in facial trustworthiness.     

Judging trustworthiness from faces: Emotion cues modulate trustworthiness judgments in young children

By adulthood, people judge trustworthiness from appearances rapidly and reliably. However, we know little about these judgments in children. This novel study investigates the developmental trajectory of explicit trust judgments from faces, and the contribution made by emotion cues across age groups. Five‐, 7‐, 10‐year‐olds, and adults rated the trustworthiness of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces with neutral expressions. The same participants also rated faces displaying overt happy and angry expressions, allowing us to investigate whether emotion cues modulate trustworthiness judgments similarly in children and adults. Results revealed that the ability to evaluate the trustworthiness of faces emerges in childhood, but may not be adult like until 10 years of age. Moreover, we show that emotion cues modulate trust judgments in young children, as well as adults. Anger cues diminished the appearance of trustworthiness for participants from 5 years of age and happy cues increased it, although this effect did not consistently emerge until later in childhood, that is, 10 years of age. These associations also extended to more subtle emotion cues present in neutral faces. Our results indicate that young children are sensitive to facial trustworthiness, and suggest that similar expression cues modulate these judgments in children and adults.     

Interpersonal relationships moderate the effect of faces on person judgments

Previous research suggests that people form impressions of others based on their facial appearance in a very fast and automatic manner, and this especially holds for trustworthiness. However, as yet, this process has been investigated mostly in a social vacuum without taking interpersonal factors into account. In the current research, we demonstrate that both the relationship context that is salient at the moment of an interaction and the performed behavior are important moderators of the impact of facial cues on impression formation. It is shown that, when the behavior of a person we encounter is ambiguous in terms of trustworthiness, the relationship most salient at that moment is of crucial impact on whether and how we incorporate facial cues communicating (un)trustworthiness in our final evaluations. Ironically, this can result in less positive evaluations of interaction partners with a trustworthy face compared to interaction partners with an untrustworthy face. Implications for research on facial characteristics, trust, and relationship theories are discussed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The dissociable influence of social context on judgements of facial attractiveness and trustworthiness

The cheerleader effect occurs when the same face is rated to be more attractive when it is seen in a group compared to when seen alone. We investigated whether this phenomenon also occurs for trustworthiness judgements, and examined how these effects are influenced by the characteristics of the individual being evaluated and those of the group they are seen in. Across three experiments, we reliably replicated the cheerleader effect. Most faces became more attractive in a group. Yet, the size of the cheerleader effect that each face experienced was not related to its own attractiveness, nor to the attractiveness of the group or the group’s digitally averaged face. We discuss the implications of our findings for the hierarchical encoding and contrast mechanisms that have previously been used to explain the cheerleader effect. Surprisingly, judgements of facial trustworthiness did not experience a ‘cheerleader effect’. Instead, we found that untrustworthy faces became significantly more trustworthy in all groups, while there was no change for faces that were already trustworthy alone. Taken together, our results demonstrate that social context can have a dissociable influence on our first impressions, depending on the trait being evaluated.     

Getting off on the right foot: The role of openness to experience in fostering initial trust between culturally dissimilar partners

Cross-cultural partnerships can provide a competitive edge for organizations, but also hinder trust between individuals, and thus the flow of diverse knowledge that facilitates positive organizational outcomes. We investigate whether openness to experience (openness, in short) protects against lower trust in cross-cultural partnerships by weakening the effect of cultural diversity on trust formation processes (defined by perceived similarity and trustworthiness, serially). We randomly assigned White, American participants to partners from either the same or different (i.e., Chinese) cultural background. After introductions, participants rated their partner’s similarity and trustworthiness, and played a game assessing behavioral trust. Openness was measured 3–7 days prior. People high (versus low) on openness were more trusting towards culturally dissimilar partners because they perceived them as more similar, and thus more trustworthy.     

高确定性情绪（开心、愤怒）与低确定性情绪（悲伤）对信任的影响

本研究通过信任游戏的实验范式探讨了在与“受信任者”高/低可信赖性有关的信任线索时,具体情绪的确定性维度对信任行为的影响。实验一发现,当被试被告知“受信任者”在可信赖量表上的得分（高/低）时,个体在高确定性情绪（开心和愤怒）下的信任判断比低确定性情绪（悲伤）下的信任判断上更容易被受信任者的“可信赖性”水平的高低所影响;实验二发现,当告知被试“受信任者”的群体身份（内/外群）时,个体在高确定性情绪（开心和愤怒）下的信任判断比低确定性情绪（悲伤）下的信任判断更容易被受信任者的“内外群”身份所影响。上述结果表明,高确定性的情绪比低确定性的情绪更容易使被试的信任判断受到与“受信任者”是否值得信赖有关的线索所影响。     

Can I trust you? Negative affective priming influences social judgments in schizophrenia

Successful social interactions rely on the ability to make accurate judgments based on social cues as well as the ability to control the influence of internal or external affective information on those judgments. Prior research suggests that individuals with schizophrenia misinterpret social stimuli and this misinterpretation contributes to impaired social functioning. We tested the hypothesis that for people with schizophrenia, social judgments are abnormally influenced by affective information. Twenty-three patients with schizophrenia and 35 healthy control participants rated the trustworthiness of faces following the presentation of neutral, negative (threat-related), or positive affective primes. Results showed that all participants rated faces following negative affective primes as less trustworthy than faces following neutral or positive primes. Importantly, this effect was significantly more pronounced for participants with schizophrenia, suggesting that schizophrenia may be characterized by an exaggerated influence of negative affective information on social judgment. Furthermore, the extent that the negative affective prime influenced trustworthiness judgments was significantly associated with patients' severity of positive symptoms, particularly feelings of persecution. These findings suggest that for people with schizophrenia, negative affective information contributes to an interpretive bias, consistent with paranoid ideation, when judging the trustworthiness of others. This bias may contribute to social impairments in schizophrenia.     

Perceived trustworthiness of faces drives trust behaviour in children

Facial appearances can powerfully influence adults' trust behaviour, despite limited evidence that these cues constitute honest signals of trustworthiness. It is not clear, however, whether the same is also true for children. The current study investigated whether, like adults, 5‐year‐olds and 10‐year‐olds are more likely to place their trust in partners that look trustworthy than those that look untrustworthy. A second, closely related question was whether children also explicitly value the information from face cues when making trust decisions. We investigated these questions using Token Quest: an economic trust game that gave participants the opportunity to make investments with a series of partners who might (or might not) repay their trust with large returns. These interactions occurred under different conditions, including one in which participants were shown the face of each partner and another in which they could ‘purchase’ access to faces with a portion of their investment capital. Results indicated that, like adults, 10‐year‐old children selectively placed their trust in those partners they perceived as looking trustworthy and many were willing to ‘pay’ to purchase access to these face cues during the trust game. We observed a similar profile of trust behaviour in 5‐year‐olds, with no significant group difference in the impact of face cues on behaviour across the three age groups. Together, these findings indicate that the influence of face cues on trust behaviour emerges early, and highlight a capacity for sophisticated social cognition in young children.     

The face of an angel: Effect of exposure to details of moral behavior on facial recognition memory

The Dangerous Decisions Theory (DDT; Porter & ten Brinke, 2009) posits that instantaneous perceptions of trustworthiness based on a stranger's face influence the manner in which ensuing information about the target is processed. This study tested a bi-directional DDT model, proposing that information concerning a target's moral behavior could distort eyewitness memory for the individual's facial trustworthiness. Participants (N = 141) viewed a target individual's face (previously rated as appearing “neutral” on trustworthiness) and then were exposed to one of the three vignettes describing the target's behavior (either immoral, morally neutral, or altruistic). Following a delay, observers were asked to identify the target individual on a facial morph video (continuously ranging in levels of perceived trustworthiness). Results indicated that behavioral information varying in morality influenced facial recognition memory; specifically, faces were recalled as having less trustworthy features following a disclosure of immoral/criminal behavior.     

The contribution of facial regions to judgements of happiness and trustworthiness from dynamic expressions

What expressive facial features and processing mechanisms make a person look trustworthy, relative to happy? Participants judged the un/happiness or un/trustworthiness of people with dynamic expressions in which the eyes and/or the mouth unfolded from neutral to happy or vice versa. Faces with an unfolding smile looked more trustworthy and happier than faces with a neutral mouth, regardless of the eye expression. Unfolding happy eyes increased both trustworthiness and happiness only in the presence of a congruent unfolding smiling mouth. Nevertheless, the contribution of the mouth was greater for happiness than for trustworthiness; and the mouth was especially visually salient for expressions favouring happiness more than trustworthiness. We conclude that the categorisation of facial happiness is more automatically driven by the visual saliency of a single feature, that is, the smiling mouth, while perception of trustworthiness is more strategic, with the eyes being necessarily incorporated into a configural face representation.     

Vulnerability to depression is associated with a failure to acquire implicit social appraisals

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with disrupted relationships with partners, family, and peers. These problems can precipitate the onset of clinical illness, influence severity and the prospects for recovery. Here, we investigated whether individuals who have recovered from depression use interpersonal signals to form favourable appraisals of others as social partners. Twenty recovered-depressed adults (with >1 adult episode of MDD but euthymic and medication-free for six months) and 23 healthy, never-depressed adults completed a task in which the gaze direction of some faces reliably cued the location a target (valid faces), whereas other faces cued the opposite location (invalid faces). No participants reported awareness of this contingency, and both groups were significantly faster to categorise targets following valid compared with invalid gaze cueing faces. Following this task, participants judged the trustworthiness of the faces. Whereas the healthy never-depressed participants judged the valid faces to be significantly more trustworthy than the invalid faces; this implicit social appraisal was absent in the recovered-depressed participants. Individuals who have recovered from MDD are able to respond appropriately to joint attention with other people but appear to not use joint attention to form implicit trust appraisals of others as potential social partners.     

Learning about faces: effects of trustworthiness on affective evaluation

The results of two studies on the relationship between evaluations of trustworthiness, valence and arousal of faces are reported. In Experiment 1, valence and trustworthiness judgments of faces were positively correlated, while arousal was negatively correlated with both trustworthiness and valence. In Experiment 2, learning about faces based on their emotional expression and the extent to which this learning is influenced by perceived trustworthiness was investigated. Neutral faces of different models differing in trustworthiness were repeatedly associated with happy or with angry expressions and the participants were asked to categorize each neutral face as belonging to a "friend" or to an "enemy" based on these associations. Four pairing conditions were defined in terms of the congruency between trustworthiness level and expression: Trustworthy-congruent, trustworthy-incongruent, untrustworthy-congruent and untrustworthy-incongruent. Categorization accuracy during the learning phase and face evaluation after learning were measured. During learning, participants learned to categorize with similar efficiency trustworthy and untrustworthy faces as friends or enemies and thus no effects of congruency were found. In the evaluation phase, faces of enemies were rated as more negative and arousing than those of friends, thus showing that learning was effective to change the affective value of the faces. However, faces of untrustworthy models were still judged on average more negative and arousing than those of trustworthy ones. In conclusion, although face trustworthiness did not influence learning of associations between faces and positive or negative social information it did have a significant influence on face evaluation that was manifest even after that learning.     

男性化与女性化对面孔偏好的影响—— 基于图像处理技术和眼动的检验

采用图像处理技术和眼动探讨了性别二态线索对面孔偏好的影响。实验1发现非面孔线索未掩蔽和掩蔽时, 感知男性化技术与原始照片条件下女性化的男性面孔更有吸引力和信任度; 性别二态技术条件下, 非面孔线索未掩蔽时男性化的男性面孔更有吸引力和信任度。实验2表明被试对男性面孔的平均瞳孔大小和注视次数均大于和多于女性面孔, 首次注视时间短于女性面孔; 被试对男性化面孔的首次注视时间和首次注视持续时间均长于女性化面孔。     

Facial dynamics as indicators of trustworthiness and cooperative behavior

Detecting cooperative partners in situations that have financial stakes is crucial to successful social exchange. The authors tested whether humans are sensitive to subtle facial dynamics of counterparts when deciding whether to trust and cooperate. Participants played a 2-person trust game before which the facial dynamics of the other player were manipulated using brief (<6 s) but highly realistic facial animations. Results showed that facial dynamics significantly influenced participants' (a) choice of with whom to play the game and (b) decisions to cooperate. It was also found that inferences about the other player's trustworthiness mediated these effects of facial dynamics on cooperative behavior.