Facial First Impressions of Partner Preference Traits: Trustworthiness, Status, and Attractiveness

Abstract

This research used the minimal exposure paradigm to examine facial first impressions of traits of trustworthiness, status, and attractiveness, considered important in verbal models of partner preferences. Heterosexual participants rated opposite-sex faces comprising either naturalistic images or youthful-looking averaged faces on trustworthiness, status, and attractiveness following 33, 100, and 500 ms masked presentation. The pattern masks were phase scrambled to provide the same overall color composition, brightness, and spatial frequency content as the presented faces. Trustworthiness, status, and attractiveness judgments were all reliable at above-chance levels even at 33 ms presentation, and extra time (100 or 500 ms) only led to modest improvement in the correspondence with an independent set of time-unconstrained judgments. The increasing prevalence of online images and internet-based relationships make these findings timely and important.

Facial and self‐report questionnaire measures capture different aspects of romantic partner preferences

“…Only a single trait was evaluated by each participant to avoid carry‐over effects in which correlations between trait judgements can be inflated by participants being influenced by their previous judgements (Rhodes, ). Ratings of 10 of the 12 traits involved were already available from previous studies (South Palomares & Young, ; South Palomares et al ., ; Sutherland et al ., , ). Twenty further participants, university students, were recruited via the University (50% male, mean age of 22 years, SD = 3.45) to create the groups of 10 participants needed to rate each of the remaining two traits (‘vitality’ and ‘has resources’).…”

“…'s () verbal self‐report partner preference factors. Ratings of 10 of these 12 traits came from previous work (South Palomares & Young, ), and on this basis, we expected to be able to capture an underlying three‐factor structure. However, to ensure that Study 1 offered the closest possible comparison to Fletcher et al .…”

“…Although these previous studies by South Palomares et al . () and South Palomares and Young () show that people are, in principle, able to make evaluations of faces that could correspond to their verbally expressed partner preferences, they did not directly test this potential correspondence. Instead, participants were asked to evaluate face images in contexts where partner preferences as such were not explicitly requested.…”

“…Because rapid evaluations of faces are common in online contexts, we grounded our approach in the facial first impressions literature (Sutherland, Oldmeadow, & Young, ; Sutherland et al ., ; Todorov, ; Vernon, Sutherland, Young, & Hartley, ). In previous studies, research has found that traits from a leading model of self‐reported partner preferences (Fletcher et al ., ) are readily evaluated in naturally occurring, highly variable, face images of the type often encountered in daily life (South Palomares, Sutherland, & Young, ; South Palomares & Young, ). Moreover, research has been able to demonstrate that when evaluated from face images, these traits reflected an underlying factor structure that closely resembled both Fletcher et al .…”

What is mindreading?

“…We can make such character trait inferences very quickly, within a second or two, even when we are under cognitive load (Malle & Holbrook, ; Todorov & Uleman, ). These rapid character trait inferences turn out to be fairly accurate (Palomares & Young, ).…”