Jenny Porter

Trustworthiness and dominance impressions summarize trait judgments from faces. Judgments on these key traits are negatively correlated to each other in impressions of female faces, implying less differentiated impressions of female faces. Here we test whether this is true across many trait judgments and whether less differentiated impressions of female faces originate in different facial information used for male and female impressions or different evaluation of the same information. Using multidimensional rating datasets and data-driven modeling, we show that (1) impressions of women are less differentiated and more valence-laden than impressions of men, and find that (2) these impressions are based on similar visual information across face genders. Female face impressions were more highly intercorrelated and were better explained by valence (Study 1). These intercorrelations were higher when raters more strongly endorsed gender stereotypes. Despite the gender difference, male and...

People form impressions of others from multiple sources of information. Facial appearance is one such source and judgments based on facial appearance are made after minimal exposure to faces. A more reliable source of information is affective person learning based on others' past actions. Here we investigated whether the effects of such appearance-independent learning on face evaluation emerge after rapid face exposure, a response deadline procedure, and a lack of explicit recognition of the faces. In three experiments, participants learned to associate novel faces with negative and positive behaviors, and then evaluated the faces presented on their own, without the behaviors. Even after extremely brief exposures (e.g., 35 ms), participants evaluated faces previously associated with negative behaviors more negatively than those associated with positive behaviors (Experiment 1). The learning effect persisted when participants were asked to evaluate briefly presented faces before ...

Studies on first impressions from facial appearance have rapidly proliferated in the past decade. Almost all of these studies have relied on a single face image per target individual, and differences in impressions have been interpreted as originating in stable physiognomic differences between individuals. Here we show that images of the same individual can lead to different impressions, with within-individual image variance comparable to or exceeding between-individuals variance for a variety of social judgments (Experiment 1). We further show that preferences for images shift as a function of the context (e.g., selecting an image for online dating vs. a political campaign; Experiment 2), that preferences are predictably biased by the selection of the images (e.g., an image fitting a political campaign vs. a randomly selected image; Experiment 3), and that these biases are evident after extremely brief (40-ms) presentation of the images (Experiment 4). We discuss the implications o...

People often make approachability decisions based on perceived facial trustworthiness. However, it remains unclear how people learn trustworthiness from a population of faces and whether this learning influences their approachability decisions. Here we investigated the neural underpinning of approach behavior and tested two important hypotheses: whether the amygdala adapts to different trustworthiness ranges and whether the amygdala is modulated by task instructions and evaluative goals. We showed that participants adapted to the stimulus range of perceived trustworthiness when making approach decisions and that these decisions were further modulated by the social context. The right amygdala showed both linear response and quadratic response to trustworthiness level, as observed in prior studies. Notably, the amygdala's response to trustworthiness was not modulated by stimulus range or social context, a possible neural dynamic adaptation. Together, our data have revealed a robus...

People form impressions of others from multiple sources of information. Facial appearance is one such source and judgments based on facial appearance are made after minimal exposure to faces. A more reliable source of information is affective person learning based on others' past actions. Here we investigated whether the effects of such appearance-independent learning on face evaluation emerge after rapid face exposure, a response deadline procedure, and a lack of explicit recognition of the faces. In three experiments, participants learned to associate novel faces with negative and positive behaviors, and then evaluated the faces presented on their own, without the behaviors. Even after extremely brief exposures (e.g., 35 ms), participants evaluated faces previously associated with negative behaviors more negatively than those associated with positive behaviors (Experiment 1). The learning effect persisted when participants were asked to evaluate briefly presented faces before a response deadline (Experiment 2), although the effect was diminished. Finally, although this learning effect increased as a function of face recognition (Experiment 3), it was present with only minimal recognition, suggesting that participants do not need to deliberately retrieve behavioral information for it to influence face evaluation. Together, the findings suggest that person learning unrelated to facial appearance is a powerful determinant of face evaluation.