Accuracy and bias in first impressions of attachment style from faces

Abstract

Objective People gather important social information from subtle nonverbal cues. Given that one's attachment style can meaningfully affect the quality of one's relationships, we investigated whether people could perceive men's and women's attachment styles from photos of their neutral faces. Method In two studies, we measured targets' attachment styles then asked participants (total N = 893) to judge the male and female targets' attachment anxiety and avoidance from photos of their neutral faces (total N = 331) and to report their own attachment anxiety and avoidance. Results Participants detected men's attachment style from face photos significantly better than chance in an initial exploratory study and in a preregistered replication but did not consistently detect women's attachment style from their face photos. Moreover, participants' own attachment style biased these first impressions: Individuals with greater attachment anxiety viewed others as more anxiously attached. Conclusions People can detect some hints of unacquainted others' attachment styles from their faces but their own anxious attachment can bias these judgments.

Secure Attachment Priming Amplifies Approach Motivation for Infant Faces Among Childless Adults

“…In addition, we found that there were consistently no differences in the motivational responses to adult faces between the two groups, which was different from what we had expected. According to the results of previous studies (Dan and Raz, 2012;Kafetsios et al, 2014;Zheng et al, 2015;Petrowski et al, 2019;Alaei et al, 2020), adult attachment orientation plays a role in the response to adult faces. Another study demonstrated that changes in individuals' attachment state can affect their response to adult faces (Tang et al, 2017).…”

“…Therefore, based on the above results, because expressive adult faces carry a large amount of emotional information, they can activate the adult attachment behavioral system, which leads to different behavioral reactions among individuals. Due to the lack of emotional value of neutral adult faces, an individual’s response to them is not affected by adult attachment ( Dan and Raz, 2012 ; Kafetsios et al, 2014 ; Zheng et al, 2015 ; Tang et al, 2017 ; Petrowski et al, 2019 ; Alaei et al, 2020 ). In fact, this kind of behavior response pattern saves energy and thus represents an evolutionary adaptation.…”

“…If researchers want to strictly extract the exclusive effect of the baby face schema, they should use the following two ways to study: (1) taking adult faces as the baseline, the response differences between infant and adult faces were compared to obtain the effect of the baby face schema and (2) manipulating the typical features of the baby face schema in infant faces to extract the exclusive effect of the baby face schema. In fact, previous studies have found that human faces serve as a special stimulus in which individuals with different attachment orientations show different responses ( Dan and Raz, 2012 ; Kafetsios et al, 2014 ; Zheng et al, 2015 ; Tang et al, 2017 ; Petrowski et al, 2019 ; Alaei et al, 2020 ). However, the above studies simply investigated the relationship between attachment and the response to infant faces ( Strathearn et al, 2009 ; Lenzi et al, 2013 ; Groh and Haydon, 2017 ; Ma et al, 2019b , 2020 ).…”