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.

Typical individuals make rapid and reliable evaluations of trustworthiness from facial appearances, which can powerfully influence behaviour. However, the same may not be true for children with autism spectrum disorder. Using an economic trust game, the current study revealed that like typical children, children with autism spectrum disorder rationally modulate their trust behaviour based on non-face cues to partner trustworthiness (e.g. reputation information). Critically, however, they are no more likely to place their trust in partners with faces that look trustworthy to them, than those that look untrustworthy. These results cannot be accounted for by any group differences in children’s conceptualization of trustworthiness, ability to read trustworthiness from faces or understanding of the experimental paradigm. Instead, they seem to suggest that there may be a selective failure to spontaneously use facial cues to trustworthiness to guide behaviour in an ecologically valid context

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Ensemble coding allows adults to access useful information about average properties of groups, sometimes even in the absence of detailed representations of individual group members. This form of coding may emerge early in development with initial reports of ensemble coding for simple properties (size, numerosity) in young children and even infants. Here we demonstrate that ensemble coding of faces, which provides information about average properties of social groups, is already present in 6-8-year-old children. This access to average information increases with age from 6 to 18 years and its development is dissociable from age-related improvements in the coding of individual face identities. This dissociation provides the first direct evidence that distinct processes underlie ensemble and individual coding of face identity, evidence that has been lacking from adult studies. More generally, our results add to the emerging evidence for impressively mature sensitivity to statistical properties of the visual environment in children. They indicate that children have access to gist information about social groups that may facilitate adaptive social behaviour.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can have difficulty recognizing emotional expressions. Here, we asked whether the underlying perceptual coding of expression is disrupted. Typical individuals code expression relative to a perceptual (average) norm that is continuously updated by experience. This adaptability of face-coding mechanisms has been linked to performance on various face tasks. We used an adaptation aftereffect paradigm to characterize expression coding in children and adolescents with autism. We asked whether face expression coding is less adaptable in autism and whether there is any fundamental disruption of norm-based coding. If expression coding is norm-based, then the face aftereffects should increase with adaptor expression strength (distance from the average expression). We observed this pattern in both autistic and typically developing participants, suggesting that norm-based coding is fundamentally intact in autism. Critically, however, expression aftereffects were reduced in the autism group, indicating that expression-coding mechanisms are less readily tuned by experience. Reduced adaptability has also been reported for coding of face identity and gaze direction. Thus, there appears to be a pervasive lack of adaptability in face-coding mechanisms in autism, which could contribute to face processing and broader social difficulties in the disorder.

Face recognition performance improves during childhood, not reaching adult levels until late adolescence, yet the source of this improvement is unclear. Recognition of faces across changes in viewpoint appears particularly slow to develop. Poor cross-view recognition suggests that children's face representations may be more view specific than those of adults and is consistent with arguments that extensive experience with faces may be required to form representations that are robust to view changes. We conducted the first direct test of the view specificity of children's face representations by using face aftereffects to investigate whether children's face aftereffects transfer across changes in viewpoint. Using both the figural aftereffect (E1) and the identity aftereffect (E2) we showed that 8-year-old children's aftereffects transferred across substantial changes in viewpoint and that children did not differ from adults in the amount of transfer across viewpoint. These results suggest that children's coding of identity is no more view specific than that of adults and are consistent with a growing body of evidence indicating that the key perceptual mechanisms of face recognition emerge early in life.

Adults are proficient in extracting identity cues from faces. This proficiency develops slowly during childhood, with performance not reaching adult levels until adolescence. Bodies are similar to faces in that they convey identity cues and rely on specialized perceptual mechanisms. However, it is currently unclear whether body recognition mirrors the slow development of face recognition during childhood. Recent evidence suggests that body recognition develops faster than face recognition. Here we measured body and face recognition in 6- and 10-year-old children and adults to determine whether these two skills show different amounts of improvement during childhood. We found no evidence that they do. Face and body recognition showed similar improvement with age, and children, like adults, were better at recognizing faces than bodies. These results suggest that the mechanisms of face and body memory mature at a similar rate or that improvement of more general cognitive and perceptual skills underlies improvement of both face and body recognition.

Background: Major depressive disorder is predicted to be the lead cause of disease burden by 2030. Despite evidence suggesting that major depressive disorder can be prevented, little attention has been paid to developing interventions for this purpose. As research suggests that high levels of subjective well-being may protect against depression, an intervention that can enhance and maintain subjective well-being may assist in preventing major depressive disorder. Behavioural activation (BA) is a promising intervention that has been observed to both effectively treat depression and also enhance subjective well-being, even in a single session.Method: A randomised control design was used to investigate the efficacy of a single session of BA to boost well-being and reduce distress in a community sample of carers (N = 13), who may be at increased risk of major depressive disorder. Outcome measures assessed symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress, and well-being and the lifestyle factors of perceived environmental reward and the extent to which individuals lived in accordance with their personal values.Results: Generalised linear mixed modelling revealed significant group × time interactions for stress scores and valued living, indicating a treatment effect on these outcomes.Conclusions: Findings provide preliminary support for the effectiveness of a single session BA intervention to improve outcomes of carers. Key Points1 Given the prevalence and enormous personal, social, and economic costs associated with major depressive disorder, there is a need for interventions to prevent this disorder 2 Behavioural activation (BA) is an evidence-based approach for the treatment of depression, which has also been found to be associated with increased well-being. It may also represent a viable approach for preventing major depressive disorder. 3 The present study found that a single session of BA was associated with reduced stress and an increase in selfreported behaviour consistent with personal values; these results suggest that further investigation of the potential of BA for preventing major depressive disorder is warranted.