Effects of Emotional Expressions, Gaze, and Head Orientation on Person Perception in Social Situations

Raphaela E Kaisler,Helmut Leder,Manuela M Marin

doi:10.1177/2158244020940705

Abstract

When an observer perceives and judges two persons next to each other, different types of social cues simultaneously arise from both perceived faces. Using a controlled stimulus set depicting this scenario (with two persons identified respectively as “target face” and “looking face”), we explored how emotional expressions, gaze, and head direction of the looking face affect the observers’ eye movements and judgments of the target face. The target face always displayed a neutral expression, gazing directly at the observer (“direct gaze”). The looking face showed either a direct gaze, looked toward the target face, or averted it. A total of 52 undergraduate students (25 males) freely viewed these scenes for 5 s while their eye movements were recorded, which was followed by collecting ratings of attractiveness and trustworthiness. Dwell times on target faces were longer when accompanied by a looking face with direct gaze, regardless of its emotional expression. However, participants looked longer on faces looking toward the target in the approach condition and fixated more often on target faces that were either next to an angry-looking face directly looking at them or to a happy-looking averted face. We found no gaze effect on faces that were looked at by another face and no significant correlation between observers’ dwell time and attractiveness or trustworthiness ratings of the target and looking face, indicating dissociated perception and judgment processes. Irrespective of the gaze direction, as expected, happy faces were judged as more attractive and trustworthy than angry faces. Future studies will need to examine this dynamic interplay of social cues in triadic scenes.

Highlights

In real-life situations, people sometimes make very fast judgments based on social cues (Willis & Todorov, 2006)
We examined whether the looked-at target face would be considered more trustworthy or attractive, an effect previously shown in triadic scenes where the gaze direction
We examined how positive or negative emotional expressions of the face looking towards a target face modulate observers’ visual exploration and judgments of that target face in natural scenes

Summary

Introduction

In real-life situations, people sometimes make very fast judgments based on social cues (Willis & Todorov, 2006). In triadic scenes, when an observer is exposed to two other persons, many cues arise from the two perceived faces simultaneously (Wieser & Brosch, 2012). The two faces might differ in their emotional expressions and either looks toward or away from each other. In a situational context when two persons are involved, it is yet unclear how the different facial cues affect and how both are perceived and judged by a third person, the observer. Facial attractiveness relies on facial features, such as symmetry (Perrett et al., 1999) and averageness related to preference of mating (Langlois & Roggman, 1990), whereas perceived trustworthiness shows weaker relations with these features (Todorov, 2008) but might be more sensitive to social evaluations, the presence, and looking behavior of others

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Results

Conclusion