Perceived trustworthiness affects emotional expression perception

A growing body of research indicates that the speed and accuracy of facial emotional expression perception is influenced by social information present on the face. Beyond social category cues like sex, race, and age, more recent studies have demonstrated that characteristics like facial attractiveness can also influence emotion recognition with expressions of happiness recognised more quickly on attractive faces. Another key facial characteristic of interest is facial trustworthiness. Research has demonstrated that observers rate some faces as more trustworthy than others with a high degree of consistency. This suggests trustworthiness is another facial characteristic that may influence emotional expression perception. As such, the current study investigated how facial trustworthiness moderated the speed and accuracy of emotion recognition. Across three experiments (N ≈ 150 in each experiment) using photographs from three different face databases, participants categorised happy and angry expressions on male or female faces previously rated as high and low in trustworthiness as quickly and accurately as possible. Across experiments, there was facilitated recognition of anger expressions on non trustworthy faces and/or facilitated recognition of happiness on trustworthy faces depending on the face database used. These results demonstrate that facial trustworthiness influences emotional expression perception.

Keywords: emotional expression, person perception, response times