Projects per year
Abstract
Lay wisdom warns against “judging a book by its cover”. However, facial first impressions influence people’s behaviour towards others, so it is critical that we understand whether these impressions are at all accurate. Understanding impressions of children’s faces is particularly important because these impressions can have social consequences during a crucial time of development. Here, we examined the accuracy of two traits that capture the most variance in impressions of children’s faces, niceness and shyness. We collected face images and parental reports of actual niceness/shyness for 86 children (4-11 years old). Different images of the same person can lead to different impressions, and so we employed a novel approach by obtaining impressions from five images of each child. These images were ambient, representing the natural variability in faces. Adult strangers rated the faces for niceness (Study 1) or shyness (Study 2). Niceness impressions were modestly accurate for different images of the same child, regardless of whether these images were presented individually or simultaneously as a group. Shyness impressions were not accurate, either for images presented individually or as a group. Together, these results demonstrate modest accuracy in adults’ impressions of niceness, but not shyness, from children’s faces. Furthermore, our results reveal that this accuracy can be captured by images which contain natural face variability, and holds across different images of the same child’s face. These results invite future research into the cues and causal mechanisms underlying this link between facial impressions of niceness and nice behaviour in children.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 2328-2347 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology |
Volume | 73 |
Issue number | 12 |
Early online date | 23 Sept 2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2020 |
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Dive into the research topics of 'Adults’ facial impressions of children’s niceness, but not shyness, show modest accuracy.'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 3 Finished
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Tackling facial prejudice
Sutherland, C. (Chief Investigator)
ARC Australian Research Council
1/01/19 → 31/12/21
Project: Research
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Why does face identification ability improve during childhood?
Palermo, R. (Investigator 01), Jeffery, L. (Investigator 02) & Duchaine, B. (Investigator 03)
ARC Australian Research Council
1/01/14 → 31/12/17
Project: Research
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ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders
Crain, S. (Investigator 01), Rhodes, G. (Investigator 02), Hodges, J. (Investigator 03), Coltheart, M. (Investigator 04), Castles, A. (Investigator 05), Barnier, A. (Investigator 06), Brock, J. (Investigator 07), Byrne, B. (Investigator 08) & Palermo, R. (Investigator 09)
ARC Australian Research Council
1/01/11 → 31/12/18
Project: Research