Person Perception Comes of Age: The Salience and Significance of Age in Social Judgments

Looking more criminal: It's not so black and white

Prior research regarding the influence of face structure on character judgments and first impressions reveals that bias for certain face-types is ubiquitous, but these studies primarily used decontextualized White faces for stimuli. Given the disadvantages Black men face in the legal system, this study aimed to investigate whether the criminal face-type presented in the context of crime influenced different legal system-type judgments as a function of perpetrator race. In a mixed-model design, participants saw Black and White computer-generated faces that varied in criminality presented with either violent or nonviolent crime scenarios. At test, participants attempted to identify the original perpetrator from a photo array, along with providing penalty severity judgments for the crime committed. Results indicate that when crimes were violent, participants meted harsher penalties overall to Black faces or to high-criminality faces identified as the perpetrator. Furthermore, for violent crimes, participants were more likely to select a face from the photo array that was higher/equally as high in criminality rating relative to the actual perpetrator when memory failed or when the perpetrator was Black. Overall, the findings suggest that when people are making judgments that could influence another's livelihood, they may rely heavily on facial cues to criminality and the nature of the crime; and this is especially the case for Black faces presented in the context of violent crime. The pattern of results provides further support for the pervasive stereotype of Black men as criminal, even in our racially diverse sample wherein 36% identified as Black.

Iterated learning reveals stereotypes of facial trustworthiness that propagate in the absence of evidence

When we look at someone's face, we rapidly and automatically form robust impressions of how trustworthy they appear. Yet while people's impressions of trustworthiness show a high degree of reliability and agreement with one another, evidence for the accuracy of these impressions is weak. How do such appearance-based biases survive in the face of weak evidence? We explored this question using an iterated learning paradigm, in which memories relating (perceived) facial and behavioral trustworthiness were passed through many generations of participants. Stimuli consisted of pairs of computer-generated people's faces and exact dollar amounts that those fictional people shared with partners in a trust game. Importantly, the faces were designed to vary considerably along a dimension of perceived facial trustworthiness. Each participant learned (and then reproduced from memory) some mapping between the faces and the dollar amounts shared (i.e., between perceived facial and behavioral trustworthiness). Much like in the game of 'telephone', their reproductions then became the training stimuli initially presented to the next participant, and so on for each transmission chain. Critically, the first participant in each chain observed some mapping between perceived facial and behavioral trustworthiness, including positive linear, negative linear, nonlinear, and completely random relationships. Strikingly, participants' reproductions of these relationships showed a pattern of convergence in which more trustworthy looks were associated with more trustworthy behavior - even when there was no relationship between looks and behavior at the start of the chain. These results demonstrate the power of facial stereotypes, and the ease with which they can be propagated to others, even in the absence of any reliable origin of these stereotypes.

Poor Toddlers Feel Less Pain? Application of Class-Based Pain Stereotypes in Judgments of Children

Across four studies, we investigated whether perceptions of children’s pain are influenced by their socioeconomic status (SES). We found evidence that children with low SES were believed to feel less pain than children with high SES (Study 1), and this effect was not moderated by child’s age (Study 2). Next, we examined life hardship as a mediator of this effect among children, finding that children with low SES were rated as having lived a harder life and thus as feeling less pain (Study 3). Finally, we examined downstream consequences for hypothetical treatment recommendations. We found that participants perceived children with low SES as less sensitive to pain and therefore as requiring less pain treatment than children with high SES (Study 4). Thus, we consistently observe that stereotypes of low-SES individuals as insensitive to pain may manifest in judgments of children and their recommended pain care. Implications of this work for theory and medical practice are discussed.

The Importance of Intact Senses in Mating and Social Assessments Made by Deaf Individuals

Social perception is a multimodal process involving vision and audition as central input sources for human social cognitive processes. However, it remains unclear how profoundly deaf people assess others in the context of mating and social interaction. The current study explored the relative importance of different sensory modalities (vision, smell, and touch) in assessments of opposite- and same-sex strangers. We focused on potential sensory compensation processes in mate selection (i.e., increased importance of the intact senses in forming impressions of an opposite-sex stranger as a potential partner). A total of 74 deaf individuals and 100 normally hearing controls were included in the study sample. We found diminished importance of vision and smell in deaf participants compared with controls for opposite- and same-sex strangers, and increased importance of touch for the assessment of same-sex strangers. The results suggested that deaf people rely less on visual and olfactory cues in mating and social assessments, highlighting a possible role of sign language in shaping interpersonal tactile experience in non-romantic relationships.

Juror perceptions of the stereotypical violent crime defendant

Stereotypes and prejudice have been shown to bias information processing and decision-making. There are physical traits that are stereotypically associated with criminals (i.e. tattoos, dark skin-tone, facial untrustworthiness) and have been shown to influence juror decision-making. The current research aimed to investigate the effects of tattoos, facial trustworthiness and skin tone on juror case judgments and criminal appearance ratings, while also investigating and accounting for prejudice and motivation to respond without prejudice. Participants (n = 426) were asked to act as mock jurors in a hypothetical assault case by making case judgments and responding to appearance and attitude measures. Criminal appearance ratings indirectly mediated the relationship between physical traits and verdict decisions. Additionally, a significant interaction emerged between skin tone and racial prejudice on criminal appearance ratings, suggesting that the effects of physical traits may depend on individual attitudes. Implications and future directions are discussed.

The Public Face of Rhinoplasty: Impact on Perceived Attractiveness and Personality

BACKGROUND

The authors assess the impact of rhinoplasty on public perception of a patient's appearance and personality.

METHODS

A survey was created using standardized before-and-after photographs of 10 Caucasian women who had undergone primary rhinoplasty. Photographs of two additional women who had not undergone facial surgery were randomly included as controls, for a total of 12 survey items. Preoperative and postoperative photographs were placed side by side. The survey was administered by means of crowd-sourcing. Respondents were asked to evaluate which photograph better represented 11 traits of appearance or personality, according to a seven-point Likert scale. A score of 1 meant the preoperative photograph was much better, 7 meant the postoperative photograph was much better, and 4 meant no difference. T tests and analyses of variance were used to evaluate rating changes for each trait and differences between demographic groups.

RESULTS

There were 264 responses received. Averaged scores across the 10 survey patients produced a value for each appearance or personality trait. In 10 of 11 categories (i.e., symmetry, youthfulness, facial harmony, likeability, trustworthiness, confidence, femininity, attractiveness, approachability, and intelligence), the postoperative photograph was significantly favorable compared with the preoperative photograph (p < 0.00001). The preoperative photograph was rated higher only in aggressiveness (p < 0.001). The same scores were calculated for the controls; no significant difference in any category was seen except confidence, where the right image was viewed as more confident (mean, 4.19; p < 0.005).

CONCLUSION

Aesthetic rhinoplasty improves the public perception of a person's appearance and personality in multiple aspects.

Women Who Emerge as Leaders in Temporarily Assigned Work Groups: Attractive and Socially Competent but Not Babyfaced or Naïve?

The underrepresentation of women in top positions has been in the spotlight of research for decades. Prejudice toward female leaders, which decreases women's chances of emerging as leaders, has been discussed as a potential reason. Aiming to investigate the underlying mechanisms of this prejudice, we focused on the question of how facial characteristics might influence women's leadership emergence. Because other research has related ascribed social competence and ascribed naïveté to attractiveness and babyfacedness, respectively, we hypothesized that ascribed social competence would mediate the impact of ascribed attractiveness on leadership emergence and that ascribed naïveté would mediate the impact of ascribed babyfacedness on leadership emergence. In a pilot study, we analyzed data from 101 participants of a women's leadership contest held in 2015 in Germany. We then confirmed these results in a methodologically improved main study on other women who participated in the contest in one of two other years: 2016 and 2017 (N = 195). Women applied to participate in the contest by recording their answers to several questions in a video interview. In the contest, they were assigned to teams of about ten women each and worked on several assessment-center-like tasks. After each task, each member of each team nominated the three women they believed showed the best leadership potential in their group. We operationalized women's leadership emergence as the number of nominations received. We measured participants' facial attractiveness, babyfacedness, social competence, and naïveté by having raters follow a specifically developed rating manual to rate the answers the women gave in the video interviews. In both studies, the results indicated that women with higher ascribed facial attractiveness had higher ascribed social competence, which significantly predicted leadership emergence in the contest. Likewise, women with higher ascribed babyfacedness had higher ascribed naïveté, which significantly, albeit only slightly, negatively predicted leadership emergence. We discuss the implications of the results for personnel selection.

Implicit preference for human trustworthy faces in macaque monkeys

It has been shown that human judgements of trustworthiness are based on subtle processing of specific facial features. However, it is not known if this ability is a specifically human function, or whether it is shared among primates. Here we report that macaque monkeys (Macaca Mulatta and Macaca Fascicularis), like humans, display a preferential attention to trustworthiness-associated facial cues in computer-generated human faces. Monkeys looked significantly longer at faces categorized a priori as trustworthy compared to untrustworthy. In addition, spatial sequential analysis of monkeys’ initial saccades revealed an upward shift with attention moving to the eye region for trustworthy faces while no change was observed for the untrustworthy ones. Finally, we found significant correlations between facial width-to-height ratio– a morphometric feature that predicts trustworthiness’ judgments in humans – and looking time in both species. These findings suggest the presence of common mechanisms among primates for first impression of trustworthiness.

Humans infer the trustworthiness of others based on subtle facial features such as the facial width-to-height ratio, but it is not known whether other primates are sensitive to these cues. Here, the authors show that macaque monkeys prefer to look at human faces which appear trustworthy to humans.

Two sources of bias explain errors in facial age estimation

Accurate age estimates underpin our everyday social interactions, the provision of age-restricted services and police investigations. Previous work suggests that these judgements are error-prone, but the processes giving rise to these errors are not understood. Here, we present the first systematic test of bias in age estimation using a large database of standardized passport images of heterogeneous ages (n = 3948). In three experiments, we tested a range of perceiver age groups (n = 84), and found average age estimation error to be approximately 8 years. We show that this error can be attributed to two separable sources of bias. First, and accounting for the vast majority of variance, our results show an assimilative serial dependency whereby estimates are systematically biased towards the age of the preceding face. Second, younger faces are generally perceived to be older than they are, and older faces to be younger. In combination, these biases account for around 95% of variance in age estimates. We conclude that perception of age is modulated by representations that encode both a viewer's recent and normative exposure to faces. The finding that age perception is subject to strong top-down influences based on our immediate experience has implications for our understanding of perceptual processes involved in face perception, and for improving accuracy of age estimation in important real-world tasks.

The Saliency of Angular Shapes in Threatening and Nonthreatening Faces

Several lines of evidence suggest that angularity and curvilinearity are relied upon to infer the presence or absence of threat. This study examines whether angular shapes are more salient in threatening compared with nonthreatening emotionally neutral faces. The saliency of angular shapes was measured by the amount of local maxima in S(θ), a function that characterizes how the Fourier magnitude spectrum varies along specific orientations. The validity of this metric was tested and supported with images of threatening and nonthreatening real-world objects and abstract patterns that have predominantly angular or curvilinear features (Experiment 1). This metric was then applied to computer-generated faces that maximally correlate with threat (Experiment 2a) and to real faces that have been rated according to threat (Experiment 3). For computer-generated faces, angular shapes became increasingly salient as the threat level of the faces increased. For real faces, the saliency of angular shapes was not predictive of threat ratings after controlling for other well-established threat cues, however, other facial features related to angularity (e.g., brow steepness) and curvilinearity (e.g., round eyes) were significant predictors. The results offer preliminary support for angularity as a threat cue for emotionally neutral faces.

Valence processing of first impressions in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex: a near-infrared spectroscopy study

Previous studies have suggested that the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) plays a central role in processing first impressions; however, little is known about how dmPFC processes different valences of first impressions. Moreover, it is still unclear as to whether the dmPFC shows lateralization or only induces different levels of activation when processing positive and negative impressions. To address these questions in the present study, the brain activities for the impression judgments expressed by participants were measured with near-infrared spectroscopy. For each real facial picture, participants were asked to evaluate their first impressions on a scale from 'bad' to 'good' using a keyboard. The results showed that although the right dmPFC has a higher sensitivity in processing impressions, both the hemispheres of dmPFC showed a significant trend where the activation of positive impressions was higher than the negative ones. Accordingly, it is proposed that the dmPFC acts as a single mechanism responsible for delineating the processing of first impressions rather than two lateralized systems. Therefore, a 'positivity dominance hypothesis' is also proposed, which states that dmPFC in both hemispheres have a higher sensitivity and priority for positive impressions than negative ones. The present study provides valuable findings with respect to the role of the dmPFC in the processes of first impression formation.

First Impressions From Faces

Although cultural wisdom warns 'don't judge a book by its cover,' we seem unable to inhibit this tendency even though it can produce inaccurate impressions of people's psychological traits and has significant social consequences. One explanation for this paradox is that first impressions of faces overgeneralize our adaptive impressions of categories of people that those faces resemble (including babies, familiar or unfamiliar people, unfit people, emotional people). Research testing these 'overgeneralization' hypotheses elucidates why we form first impressions from faces, what impressions we form, and what cues influence these impressions. This article focuses on commonalities in impressions across diverse perceivers. However, brief attention is given to individual differences in impressions and impression accuracy.

Forever Young?

This study compares age identities of middle-aged and older adults in the United States and Germany. Differences between countries in social systems and cultural meanings of old age are expected to produce different age identities. Data are from respondents between ages 40 and 74 in the United States (MIDUS; n = 2,006) and Germany (German Aging Survey; n = 3,331). Americans and Germans tend to feel younger than their actual age, but the discrepancy is larger among Americans. The bias toward youthful identities is stronger at older ages, particularly among Americans. In both counties, persons with better health have younger identities and role losses are not related to age identities. The study shows that different social and cultural systems produce different subjective experiences of aging. As these differences exist within Western culture, the study makes clear that one should be careful in generalizing findings from aging research across countries.

Infants' Selectively Pay Attention to the Information They Receive from a Native Speaker of Their Language

From the first moments of their life, infants show a preference for their native language, as well as toward speakers with whom they share the same language. This preference appears to have broad consequences in various domains later on, supporting group affiliations and collaborative actions in children. Here, we propose that infants' preference for native speakers of their language also serves a further purpose, specifically allowing them to efficiently acquire culture specific knowledge via social learning. By selectively attending to informants who are native speakers of their language and who probably also share the same cultural background with the infant, young learners can maximize the possibility to acquire cultural knowledge. To test whether infants would preferably attend the information they receive from a speaker of their native language, we familiarized 12-month-old infants with a native and a foreign speaker, and then presented them with movies where each of the speakers silently gazed toward unfamiliar objects. At test, infants' looking behavior to the two objects alone was measured. Results revealed that infants preferred to look longer at the object presented by the native speaker. Strikingly, the effect was replicated also with 5-month-old infants, indicating an early development of such preference. These findings provide evidence that young infants pay more attention to the information presented by a person with whom they share the same language. This selectivity can serve as a basis for efficient social learning by influencing how infants' allocate attention between potential sources of information in their environment.

The Relationship between Appearance and Personality Across the Life Span

Using archival data, the relationship of appearance to personality was investigated from childhood to age 60. Lagged effects of appearance on personality and vice versa, as well as accuracy of appearance stereotypes, were assessed. For men, lagged effects of attractiveness on personality were consistent with a self fulfilling prophecy; for adolescent boys, lagged effects of babyfaceness on personality were consistent with a self-defeating prophecy; for women, lagged effects of personality on attractiveness were consistent with a Dorian Gray effect, whereby early personality produces a congruent later appearance. There was no evidence for accuracy of the baby-face stereotype, which was significantly inaccurate for adolescent boys. Accuracy of the attractiveness stereotype required effects of a stable earlier appearance on later personality or a stable earlier personality on later appearance.

Appearance, Stereotype-Incongruent Behavior, and Social Relationships

The relationship of appearance to family and peer relationships was investigated in a sample of delinquent adolescent boys and a matched sample of nondelinquents, controlling for age, IQ, socioeconomic status, and family risk factors. As predicted, the effects of appearance on family relationships varied with the boys’ delinquency status, with more baby faced or more attractive delinquents experiencing more adverse effects and more baby faced or more attractive nondelinquents experiencing more favorable effects. These results were attributed in part to a contrast effect whereby delinquents’ violation of the benign expectations held for baby faced or attractive individuals results in more negative outcomes for those individuals than for their more mature faced or unattractive peers. Consistent with previous research, peer relationships were better for attractive boys, albeit only when they were delinquent. Peer relationships tended to be poorer for baby faced boys regardless of their delinquency status.

Physical Appearance and Control Beliefs in Young, Middle-Aged, and Older Adults

The authors investigated whether general and domain-specific control beliefs were related to stigmatizing physical appearance qualities in young, middle-aged, and older adults. Being babyfaced, unattractive, or short was associated with diminished control beliefs in young and middle adulthood, whereas being overweight was not. Those who were less attractive, more babyfaced, shorter, or heavier sometimes perceived more rather than less control than their more favored peers, suggesting that individuals whose appearance creates social barriers may compensate with greater efforts to control their social environment. One notable age difference was that high babyfaceness was associated with diminished control beliefs at younger ages but with higher control beliefs in older adulthood.

First Impressions

People often draw trait inferences from the facial appearance of other people. We investigated the minimal conditions under which people make such inferences. In five experiments, each focusing on a specific trait judgment, we manipulated the exposure time of unfamiliar faces. Judgments made after a 100-ms exposure correlated highly with judgments made in the absence of time constraints, suggesting that this exposure time was sufficient for participants to form an impression. In fact, for all judgments—attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence, and aggressiveness—increased exposure time did not significantly increase the correlations. When exposure time increased from 100 to 500 ms, participants' judgments became more negative, response times for judgments decreased, and confidence in judgments increased. When exposure time increased from 500 to 1,000 ms, trait judgments and response times did not change significantly (with one exception), but confidence increased for some of the judgments; this result suggests that additional time may simply boost confidence in judgments. However, increased exposure time led to more differentiated person impressions.

Incipient Social Groups: An Analysis via In-Vivo Behavioral Tracking

Social psychology is fundamentally the study of individuals in groups, yet there remain basic unanswered questions about group formation, structure, and change. We argue that the problem is methodological. Until recently, there was no way to track who was interacting with whom with anything approximating valid resolution and scale. In the current study we describe a new method that applies recent advances in image-based tracking to study incipient group formation and evolution with experimental precision and control. In this method, which we term “in vivo behavioral tracking,” we track individuals’ movements with a high definition video camera mounted atop a large field laboratory. We report results of an initial study that quantifies the composition, structure, and size of the incipient groups. We also apply in-vivo spatial tracking to study participants’ tendency to cooperate as a function of their embeddedness in those crowds. We find that participants form groups of seven on average, are more likely to approach others of similar attractiveness and (to a lesser extent) gender, and that participants’ gender and attractiveness are both associated with their proximity to the spatial center of groups (such that women and attractive individuals are more likely than men and unattractive individuals to end up in the center of their groups). Furthermore, participants’ proximity to others early in the study predicted the effort they exerted in a subsequent cooperative task, suggesting that submergence in a crowd may predict social loafing. We conclude that in vivo behavioral tracking is a uniquely powerful new tool for answering longstanding, fundamental questions about group dynamics.

Does Seeing Faces of Young Black Boys Facilitate the Identification of Threatening Stimuli?

Pervasive stereotypes linking Black men with violence and criminality can lead to implicit cognitive biases, including the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons. In four experiments, we investigated whether these biases extend even to young Black boys (5-year-olds). White participants completed sequential priming tasks in which they categorized threatening and nonthreatening objects and words after brief presentations of faces of various races (Black and White) and ages (children and adults). Results consistently revealed that participants had less difficulty (i.e., faster response times, fewer errors) identifying threatening stimuli and more difficulty identifying nonthreatening stimuli after seeing Black faces than after seeing White faces, and this racial bias was equally strong following adult and child faces. Process-dissociation-procedure analyses further revealed that these effects were driven entirely by automatic (i.e., unintentional) racial biases. The collective findings suggest that the perceived threat commonly associated with Black men may generalize even to young Black boys.

The influence of political candidates' facial appearance on older and younger adults' voting choices and actual electoral success

Younger adults (YA) judgments of political candidates' competence from facial appearance accurately predict electoral success. Whether this is true for older adults (OA) has not been investigated despite the fact that OA are more likely to vote than YA and may respond differently to particular facial qualities. We examined whether OA and YA ratings of competence, trustworthiness, attractiveness, and babyfaceness of opposing candidates in US Senate elections independently predicted their own vote choices and actual election outcomes. OA and YA ratings of attractiveness, competence, and trustworthiness positively predicted their choices, but the effect of competence was weaker for OA. Babyfaceness negatively predicted OA, but not YA, choices. OA and YA competence ratings equally predicted the actual election winners, while OA, but not YA, attractiveness ratings did so. Trustworthy and babyface ratings did not predict actual winners. These findings have implications for understanding age differences in candidate preferences and the prediction of election outcomes.

Perceptions of competence: age moderates views of healthy aging and Alzheimer's disease

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Older adults have more complex and differentiated views of aging than do younger adults, but less is known about age-related perceptions of Alzheimer's disease. This study investigated age-related perceptions of competence of an older adult labeled as "in good health" (healthy) or "has Alzheimer's disease" (AD), using a person-perception paradigm. It was predicted that older adults would provide more differentiated assessments of the two targets than would younger adults.

METHODS

Younger (n=86; 18-36 years) and older (n=66; 61-95 years) adults rated activities of daily living (ADL), instrumental activities of daily living (IADL), and memory abilities of a female target aged 75 years, described as healthy or with AD. Data on anxiety about aging, knowledge of and experience with aging and AD, knowledge of memory aging, and positive and negative biases toward aging and AD were also collected.

RESULTS

Older adults perceived the healthy target as more capable of cognitively effortful activities (e.g., managing finances) and as possessing better memory abilities than the AD target. As predicted, these differences were greater than differences between targets perceived by younger adults. The interaction effect remained significant after statistically controlling for relevant variables, including education and gender. Additionally, exploratory analyses revealed that older adults held less positively biased views of AD than younger adults, but negatively biased views were equivalent between age groups.

CONCLUSION

The results demonstrate that mere labels of "healthy" and "Alzheimer's disease" produce significant and subtle age differences in perceived competencies of older adults, and that biases towards AD vary by age group and valence. Our findings extend the person-perception paradigm to an integrative analysis of aging and AD, are consistent with models of adult development, and complement current research and theory on stereotypes of aging. Future directions for research on perceptions of aging are suggested.

Vocal fundamental and formant frequencies affect perceptions of speaker cooperativeness

In recent years, the perception of social traits in faces and voices has received much attention. Facial and vocal masculinity are linked to perceptions of trustworthiness; however, while feminine faces are generally considered to be trustworthy, vocal trustworthiness is associated with masculinized vocal features. Vocal traits such as pitch and formants have previously been associated with perceived social traits such as trustworthiness and dominance, but the link between these measurements and perceptions of cooperativeness have yet to be examined. In Experiment 1, cooperativeness ratings of male and female voices were examined against four vocal measurements: fundamental frequency (F0), pitch variation (F0-SD), formant dispersion (Df), and formant position (Pf). Feminine pitch traits (F0 and F0-SD) and masculine formant traits (Df and Pf) were associated with higher cooperativeness ratings. In Experiment 2, manipulated voices with feminized F0 were found to be more cooperative than voices with masculinized F0(,) among both male and female speakers, confirming our results from Experiment 1. Feminine pitch qualities may indicate an individual who is friendly and non-threatening, while masculine formant qualities may reflect an individual that is socially dominant or prestigious, and the perception of these associated traits may influence the perceived cooperativeness of the speakers.

Growing Fixed With Age: Lay Theories of Malleability Are Target Age-Specific

Beliefs about whether people can change ("lay theories" of malleability) are known to have wide-ranging effects on social motivation, cognition, and judgment. Yet rather than holding an overarching belief that people can or cannot change, perceivers may hold independent beliefs about whether different people are malleable-that is, lay theories may be target-specific. Seven studies demonstrate that lay theories are target-specific with respect to age: Perceivers hold distinct, uncorrelated lay theories of people at different ages, and younger targets are considered to be more malleable than older targets. Both forms of target-specificity are consequential, as target age-specific lay theories predict policy support for learning-based senior services and the rehabilitation of old and young drug users. The implications of target age-specific lay theories for a number of psychological processes, the social psychology of aging, and theoretical frameworks of malleability beliefs are discussed.

CHILDREN'S AND ADULTS' JUDGMENTS OF FACIAL TRUSTWORTHINESS: THE RELATIONSHIP TO FACIAL ATTRACTIVENESS

Existing research suggests that adults make effective trustworthiness judgments based on facial attractiveness during initial interactions. However, little is known about how children judge trustworthiness from faces. The present study examined the facial features that contributed to judgments of trustworthiness and attractiveness by three groups of Chinese children aged 8 years old (n=34; 17 boys), 10 years old (n=34; 17 boys), and 12 years old (n = 34; 17 boys) and a comparison group of 37 undergraduates (M age=20.2 yr.; 16 men). Using FaceGen Modeler 3.1, a total of 400 East Asian adult faces (200 male, 200 female) portraying neutral emotions with direct gazes were generated. The faces were represented by 61 shape features and were presented for a maximum of 3,000 msec. in the center of the computer screen in randomized order. The participants were asked to judge whether each person was trustworthy and to rate the level of trustworthiness; 1 month later, the attractiveness of the same faces was judged using a similar procedure. The children and the adults used similar facial features to judge trustworthiness (e.g., the brow ridge, nose, and chin). Some of the facial features used by the different age groups as the basis for the trustworthiness and attractiveness judgments were similar. Facial attractiveness accounted for roughly 30 to 60% of the variance in the groups' trustworthiness judgments. Thus, facial attractiveness may serve as a heuristic property that signals trustworthiness and guides adaptive social decisions. More importantly, even children as young as 8 years old use a strategy similar to that of adults to make trustworthiness judgments, although some differences in the use of specific facial features were observed among the age groups.

Revisiting Milgram's Cyranoid Method: Experimenting With Hybrid Human Agents

In two studies based on Stanley Milgram's original pilots, we present the first systematic examination of cyranoids as social psychological research tools. A cyranoid is created by cooperatively joining in real-time the body of one person with speech generated by another via covert speech shadowing. The resulting hybrid persona can subsequently interact with third parties face-to-face. We show that naïve interlocutors perceive a cyranoid to be a unified, autonomously communicating person, evidence for a phenomenon Milgram termed the "cyranic illusion." We also show that creating cyranoids composed of contrasting identities (a child speaking adult-generated words and vice versa) can be used to study how stereotyping and person perception are mediated by inner (dispositional) vs. outer (physical) identity. Our results establish the cyranoid method as a unique means of obtaining experimental control over inner and outer identities within social interactions rich in mundane realism.

Social attributions from faces: determinants, consequences, accuracy, and functional significance

Since the early twentieth century, psychologists have known that there is consensus in attributing social and personality characteristics from facial appearance. Recent studies have shown that surprisingly little time and effort are needed to arrive at this consensus. Here we review recent research on social attributions from faces. Section I outlines data-driven methods capable of identifying the perceptual basis of consensus in social attributions from faces (e.g., What makes a face look threatening?). Section II describes nonperceptual determinants of social attributions (e.g., person knowledge and incidental associations). Section III discusses evidence that attributions from faces predict important social outcomes in diverse domains (e.g., investment decisions and leader selection). In Section IV, we argue that the diagnostic validity of these attributions has been greatly overstated in the literature. In the final section, we offer an account of the functional significance of these attributions.

Appearance-based inferences bias source memory

Previous research varying the trustworthiness of appearance has demonstrated that facial characteristics contribute to source memory. Two studies extended this work by investigating the contribution to source memory of babyfaceness, a facial quality known to elicit strong spontaneous trait inferences. Young adult participants viewed younger and older babyfaced and mature-faced individuals paired with sentences that were either congruent or incongruent with the target's facial characteristics. Identifying a source as dominant or submissive was least accurate when participants chose between a target whose behavior was incongruent with facial characteristics and a lure whose face mismatched the target in appearance but matched the source memory question. In Experiment 1, this effect held true when older sources were identified, but not own-age, younger sources. When task difficulty was increased in Experiment 2, the relationship between face-behavior congruence and lure facial characteristics persisted, but it was not moderated by target age even though participants continued to correctly identify fewer older than younger sources. Taken together, these results indicate that trait expectations associated with variations in facial maturity can bias source memory for both own- and other-age faces, although own-age faces are less vulnerable to this bias, as is shown in the moderation by task difficulty.

Investigating the early stages of person perception: the asymmetry of social categorization by sex vs. age

Early perceptual operations are central components of the dynamics of social categorization. The wealth of information provided by facial cues presents challenges to our understanding of these early stages of person perception. The current study aimed to uncover the dynamics of processing multiply categorizable faces, notably as a function of their gender and age. Using a modified four-choice version of a mouse-tracking paradigm (which assesses the relative dominance of two categorical dimensions), the relative influence that sex and age have on each other during categorization of infant, younger adult, and older adult faces was investigated. Results of these experiments demonstrate that when sex and age dimensions are simultaneously categorized, only for infant faces does age influence sex categorization. In contrast, the sex of both young and older adults was shown to influence age categorization. The functional implications of these findings are discussed in light of previous person perception research.

Babyfacedness, sex of face stimulus, and social context in face perception and person evaluation

This research investigated whether the well-documented babyface stereotypical effects are moderated by sex of face stimuli and social context. 'Medical doctor' and 'political candidate' were selected as two social contexts which differ at the private/public level. An experiment was conducted with 245 adults (M age = 38.5 yr., SD = 8.6, range = 23 to 64). Babyface effects were stronger for the babyfaced female in the political context, but greater for the babyfaced male in the doctor-patient context. Babyfacedness could be a disadvantage to men in political contexts if political sophistication is judged by their facial characteristics. The results of overall impressions are similar to the patterns of the likeability rating. Individual differences (political sophistication and health consciousness) account for little variance in inference-making or impression formation. Implications of the current findings are discussed, as are directions for future research.

Older Adults' Trait Impressions of Faces Are Sensitive to Subtle Resemblance to Emotions

Younger adults (YA) attribute emotion-related traits to people whose neutral facial structure resembles an emotion (emotion overgeneralization). The fact that older adults (OA) show deficits in accurately labeling basic emotions suggests that they may be relatively insensitive to variations in the emotion resemblance of neutral expression faces that underlie emotion overgeneralization effects. On the other hand, the fact that OA, like YA, show a 'pop-out' effect for anger, more quickly locating an angry than a happy face in a neutral array, suggests that both age groups may be equally sensitive to emotion resemblance. We used computer modeling to assess the degree to which neutral faces objectively resembled emotions and assessed whether that resemblance predicted trait impressions. We found that both OA and YA showed anger and surprise overgeneralization in ratings of danger and naiveté, respectively, with no significant differences in the strength of the effects for the two age groups. These findings suggest that well-documented OA deficits on emotion recognition tasks may be more due to processing demands than to an insensitivity to the social affordances of emotion expressions.

Social judgments from faces

People make rapid and consequential social judgments from minimal (non-emotional) facial cues. There has been rapid progress in identifying the perceptual basis of these judgments using data-driven, computational models. In contrast, our understanding of the neural underpinnings of these judgments is rather limited. Meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies find a wide range of seemingly inconsistent responses in the amygdala that co-vary with social judgments from faces. Guided by computational models of social judgments, these responses can be accounted by positing that the amygdala (and posterior face selective regions) tracks face typicality. Atypical faces, whether positively or negatively evaluated, elicit stronger responses in the amygdala. We conclude with the promise of data-driven methods for modeling neural responses to social judgments from faces.

The general age of leadership: older-looking presidential candidates win elections during war

As nation-state leaders age they increasingly engage in inter-state militarized disputes yet in industrialized societies a steady decrease in testosterone associated with aging is observed – which suggests a decrease in dominance behavior. The current paper points out that from modern societies to Old World monkeys increasing both in age and social status encourages dominant strategies to maintain acquired rank. Moreover, it is argued this consistency has shaped an implicit prototype causing followers to associate older age with dominance leadership. It is shown that (i) faces of older leaders are preferred during intergroup conflict and (ii) morphing U.S. Presidential candidates to appear older or younger has an overriding effect on actual election outcomes. This indicates that democratic voting can be systematically adjusted by activating innate biases. These findings appear to create a new line of research regarding the biology of leadership and contextual cues of age.

First Impressions From Faces Among U.S. and Culturally Isolated Tsimane’ People in the Bolivian Rainforest

The authors examined the generalizability of first impressions from faces previously documented in industrialized cultures to the Tsimane’ people in the remote Bolivian rainforest. Tsimane’ as well as U.S. judges showed within-culture agreement in impressions of attractiveness, babyfaceness, and traits (healthy, intelligent/knowledgeable, dominant/respected, and sociable/warm) of own-culture faces. Both groups also showed within-culture agreement for impressions of other-culture faces, although it was weaker than for own-culture faces, particularly among Tsimane’ judges. Moreover, there was between-culture agreement, particularly for Tsimane’ faces. Use of facial attractiveness to judge traits contributed to agreement within and between cultures but did not fully explain it. Furthermore, Tsimane’, like U.S., judges showed a strong attractiveness halo in impressions of faces from both cultures as well as the babyface stereotype, albeit more weakly. In addition to cross-cultural similarities in trait impressions from faces, supporting a universal mechanism, some effects were moderated by perceiver and face culture, consistent with perceiver attunements conditioned by culturally specific perceptual learning.

Universals and Cultural Differences in Forming Personality Trait Judgments From Faces

Previous research has shown high cross-cultural consensus in personality trait judgments based on faces. However, the information that was provided in these studies included extrafacial features, such as hairstyle or clothes. Such styling information can be intentionally chosen by target persons to express who they are. Using a well-developed and validated Western face model, we were able to formalize the static facial information that is used to make certain personality trait judgments, namely, aggressiveness, extroversion, likeability, risk seeking, social skills, and trustworthiness judgments. We manipulated this information in photographs of Asian and Western faces with natural-looking results. Asian and Western participants identified the enhanced salience of all different personality traits in the faces. Asian participants, however, needed more time for this task. Moreover, faces with enhanced salience of aggressiveness, extroversion, social skills, and trustworthiness were better identified by Western than by Asian participants.

Task-invariant brain responses to the social value of faces

In two fMRI experiments (n = 44) using tasks with different demands-approach-avoidance versus one-back recognition decisions-we measured the responses to the social value of faces. The face stimuli were produced by a parametric model of face evaluation that reduces multiple social evaluations to two orthogonal dimensions of valence and power [Oosterhof, N. N., & Todorov, A. The functional basis of face evaluation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., 105, 11087-11092, 2008]. Independent of the task, the response within regions of the occipital, fusiform, and lateral prefrontal cortices was sensitive to the valence dimension, with larger responses to low-valence faces. Additionally, there were extensive quadratic responses in the fusiform gyri and dorsal amygdala, with larger responses to faces at the extremes of the face valence continuum than faces in the middle. In all these regions, participants' avoidance decisions correlated with brain responses, with faces more likely to be avoided evoking stronger responses. The findings suggest that both explicit and implicit face evaluation engage multiple brain regions involved in attention, affect, and decision making.

Self-perceived Age and Attitudes Toward Marketing of Older Consumers in China

Understanding consumer psychological characteristics and their impact on consumer behavior is an important foundation for business marketing strategies. Self-perceived age has a great impact on older consumers' behavior. This article defines the gray market in China, investigates the factors that affect the differences between older consumers' self-perceived age and life age, and analyzes the influence of self-perceived age on older Chinese consumers' behavior. In this study, 1,120 older consumers were randomly selected from six cities in China. Findings show that over half of the respondents feel younger than their actual life age. Related marketing strategies are discussed.