Affective evaluation of images influences personality judgments through gaze perception.

Risako Shirai,Hirokazu Ogawa,Veronica Whitford

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0241351

Risako Shirai, Hirokazu Ogawa + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241351

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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.

Highlights

Since cooperative relationships always come with a risk of betrayal, we as individuals must be able to make judgments of whether or not others can be trusted
Gaze cueing and personality judgment images are evaluated as more untrustworthy than no-cue faces. These findings demonstrated that the observed gaze direction modulated the effect of emotional images on facial evaluation
Our results demonstrated that faces that consistently looked at positive target images were evaluated as more trustworthy than faces that consistently looked at negative images

Summary

Introduction

Since cooperative relationships always come with a risk of betrayal, we as individuals must be able to make judgments of whether or not others can be trusted. Cosmides argued that humans have a domain-specific “cheater detection module,” which indicates that we are good at detecting violations of social rules [1]. It has been suggested that humans can recognize deceptive faces better than cooperative faces (e.g., [2]). Various factors can influence the judging of the personality of others. One of these factors involves the kind of emotional information that is associated with a to-be-judged person. Evaluative conditioning (EC) has been used to study how pairing an object or person with

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