灰姑娘能变成白雪公主吗?感知到的信任对他人面孔表征的影响

Can Cinderella become Snow White?The influence of perceived trustworthiness on the mental representation of faces

本研究考察对他人可信程度的感知是否会影响对该人物面孔长相的表征及其潜在的机制。实验1让被试形成目标人物可信或不可信的印象。随后利用反相关图像分类技术将被试对目标人物面孔的心理表征可视化。结果发现无论目标人物是男性还是女性,高可信度的目标人物与更具吸引力和积极特质的面孔表征相关。实验2从一批新的被试中可视化了可信和不可信群体的面孔表征的特征,并与实验1中获得的目标人物的面孔表征的特征做相似性分析,发现被描述为可信(或不可信)的目标人物的面孔表征特征与可信(或不可信)群体的面孔表征特征有更多的相似性,说明当人们得知他人是可信(或不可信)时,会把脑海中的对应图式特征叠加到该人物的面孔物理特征上,从而重塑面孔表征。本研究说明自上而下的加工方式在面孔表征形成中扮演了重要作用。

People often infer others’social traits,such as trustworthiness,from a glance at their face.Whereas previous studies have focused on how different facial cues influence social perception,the present study examined whether perception of a person’s trustworthiness could influence mental representations of that person’s face,as well as the mechanisms underlying this process.Two experiments were conducted.Experiment 1 was designed to test whether a target person described as trustworthy would be represented in the perceiver’s mind as more attractive than the same person described as untrustworthy.Participants were instructed to form an impression about a target person’s trustworthiness by viewing the person’s face paired with a description labeling them as trustworthy or untrustworthy.The reverse correlation image classification(RCIC)technique was then used to visualize the participants’mental representations of the target person’s face.A separate group of participants was recruited to evaluate the attractiveness and other traits of the generated mental representation images.Experiment 2 aimed to determine a possible underlying mechanism by exploring whether the mental representations of the trustworthy(or untrustworthy)target persons’faces in Experiment 1 shared more similarities with those of the trustworthy(or untrustworthy)faces at a group level(i.e.,prototypes of trustworthy or untrustworthy faces).To achieve this goal,we recruited participants to complete an alternate RCIC task in which they selected which of two faces appeared more trustworthy,producing mental representation images for trustworthy and untrustworthy faces at a group level.The features of these prototypical trustworthy and untrustworthy faces were then compared with those of the target person from Experiment 1.In Experiment 1,mental representations of a face described as trustworthy were found to be more attractive than those of the same face described as untrustworthy.Furthermore,raters attributed additional desirable traits,such as friendly,intelligent,and positive,to the representation of the trustworthy person.In Experiment 2,we found that the mental representation of the face labeled as trustworthy in Experiment 1 shared more similarities with the prototypical trustworthy face produced in Experiment 2 than with the prototypical untrustworthy face.In sum,our findings suggest that the perception of a person’s trustworthiness can influence mental representations of that person’s face.When people perceive an individual as trustworthy(or untrustworthy),they may superimpose the corresponding schema features in their minds onto the physical characteristics of the perceived individual’s face,leading to a reconfiguration of the face representation.Our study underscores the importance of top-down factors in shaping face representations.