Age‐Related Differences in Sensitivity to Facial Trustworthiness: Perceptual Representation and the Role of Emotional Development

Abstract

The ability to discriminate social signals from faces is a fundamental component of human social interactions whose developmental origins are still debated. In this study, 5‐year‐old (N = 29) and 7‐year‐old children (N = 31) and adults (N = 34) made perceptual similarity and trustworthiness judgments on a set of female faces varying in level of expressed trustworthiness. All groups represented perceived similarity of the faces as a function of trustworthiness intensity, but such representation becomes more fine‐grained with development. Moreover, 5‐year‐olds' accuracy in choosing the more trustworthy face in a pair varied as a function of children's score at the Test of Emotion Comprehension, suggesting that the ability to perform face‐to‐trait inferences is related to the development of emotional understanding.

Parents reinforce the formation of first impressions in conversation with their children

“…The pattern in responses we saw in Study 1 for emotion discussion seem to be reflected in Study 2 with both parents and children describing emotional states and expressions in relation to each other. This corresponds with previous research suggesting that first impressions from appearance is closely tied to emotion understanding [40].…”

“…As seen in Example 4, discussion of emotional states were often accompanied by description of the character's expression, perhaps aiding in children's emotion recognition ability which has been shown to increase significantly across the age range tested [35]. Related to this, other work has demonstrated that 5-year-olds ability to make trait inferences such as trustworthiness vary as a function of emotional comprehension [36] meaning that this emotion knowledge, scaffolded by parent conversation, may first be necessary before face-trait inferences can occur. Indeed, many researchers believe trait inferences to be a direct product of overgeneralisation from emotional cues [16].…”

Sensitivity to trustworthiness cues in own- and other-race faces: The role of spatial frequency information

“…The White continuum was obtained by selecting a subset of 5 faces (i.e. by excluding the two trustworthiness extremes) from a previously validated seven-step continuum [ 38 ]. The Asian continuum was generated following the same procedure adopted to create the White stimuli (see details in Baccolo & Macchi Cassia, [ 38 ])—i.e.…”

“…Participants’ sensitivity to differences in trustworthiness intensity was inferred from their performance in an online version of a Pairwise Preference task used in previous studies on trustworthiness perception in adults and children [ 38 ]. Participants were asked to indicate which face they would trust more within a pair randomly selected from a five-step trustworthiness continuum, and the participant’s response was used to compute a trustworthiness score for each face of the continuum.…”

Evidence for a kernel of truth in children’s facial impressions of children’s niceness, but not shyness.

“…For example, both 8-year old children and adults use facial width-to-height-ratio to cue impressions of aggression from adult faces (Short, et al, 2012). However, there may be subtle differences between children's and adults' impressions (Baccolo & Cassia, 2019;Caulfield, Ewing, Bank, & Rhodes, 2016;Ma, Xu, & Luo, 2015;Mondloch et al, 2019;Palmquist et al, 2019). For example, compared with adults, children from 8-10 years old are less likely to use attractiveness to cue impressions of trustworthiness (Ma et al, 2015), and children from 4-10 years old do not always rely on the same emotional cues when forming implicit trait judgments of adult faces (Mondloch et al, 2019).…”