Affective evaluation of images influences personality judgments through gaze perception

Abstract

Faces that consistently shifted the gaze to subsequent target locations in a gaze cueing task were chosen as being more trustworthy than faces that always looked away from the target, suggesting that the validity of a gaze cue influenced the viewers’ judgments regarding the trustworthiness of human faces. We investigated whether the gaze cueing effect and judgments regarding the personality conveyed by a face would be affected by the valence of a target. A face image moved its eyes to the left or the right, and an emotional target image (positive, negative, or neutral) appeared to left or right of the face. Participants had to indicate the location of this target by pressing a key. The target image was preceded by a face that shifted its gaze to the target image (valid cue), a face that directed its gaze to the opposite side (invalid cue), or a face that did not move its eyes (no cue). The perceived trustworthiness of the face was evaluated after the gaze-cueing task. Results showed that faces that looked at positive targets were evaluated as more trustworthy than faces that looked at negative targets. However, the valence of the targets did not affect trustworthiness ratings in invalid and no-cue conditions. We suggest that integrated information about the predictability of the gaze cue and the valence of the gaze target modulates impressions about the personality of the face.

Enriched sensory feedback delivered during a voluntary action boosts subjective time compression

“…A total of 20 experimentally naïve adults (13 women and 7 men) aged 20–39 years ( M = 29.3 years; SD = 6.7 years) participated in this study and received monetary compensation for their involvement. The sample size was determined through a power analysis using G*Power ( Faul et al, 2007 ) and the solution proposed by David Morse ( Shirai and Ogawa, 2020 ). 1 The analysis indicated that at least 17 participants were needed to detect a medium effect ( f = 0.25) with 80% power and a significance level of 0.05 for a two-way repeated measures within-subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA).…”

The influence of social and emotional context on the gaze leading orienting effect

“…For example, Bayliss et al (2010) showed boosted gaze cueing for pleasant target images cued by smiling faces, illustrating some evidence for contextual congruency boosting social attention. More recently, it has been shown that the valence of the looked at the object in a gaze cueing task has consequences for our perception of the cueing face-face identities that happen to cue our attention towards positive images are rated as more trustworthy than faces that cue attention towards unpleasant images (Shirai & Ogawa, 2020). Therefore, it appears that there is a complex array of protentional bidirectional effective influences within such triadic interactions.…”