Can Cinderella become Snow White? The Influence of Perceived Trustworthiness on the Mental Representation of Faces

Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-05-01

Li, Qinggong Fang, Wei Hu, Chao Shi, Dejun Hu, Xiaoqing Fu, Genyue Wang, Qiandong

Abstract： This study examined whether the perception of an individual’s trustworthiness influenced the mental representation of that face and its underlying mechanisms.
In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to develop an opinion about a target person’s trustworthiness, perceiving him/her as either trustworthy or untrustworthy. Then, the reverse correlation image classification technology was employed to visualize participants’ mental representations of the target person’s face. The results showed that regardless of the target person’s gender, those described as highly trustworthy were associated with more positive and attractive facial representations.
In Experiment 2, group’s facial mental representation features of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces were compared with those of the target person from Experiment 1. The results revealed that the face representation features of the target people described as trustworthy (or untrustworthy) had more similarities with those of trustworthy (or untrustworthy) groups.
The findings indicated that when people perceive an individual as trustworthy (or untrustworthy), they would superimpose the corresponding schema features in their minds on the physical characteristics of the perceived individual’s face, leading to a reconfiguration of the face representation. Overall, our study underscores the importance of top-down factors in shaping face representations.

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