Should I trust you? Investigating trustworthiness judgements of painful facial expressions.

Autor: Van der Biest M; Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Ghent, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent, Belgium., Cracco E; Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium., Riva P; Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy., Valentini E; Department of Psychology and Centre for Brain Science, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom. Electronic address: evalent@essex.ac.uk.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Acta psychologica [Acta Psychol (Amst)] 2023 May; Vol. 235, pp. 103893. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Mar 24.
DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2023.103893
Abstrakt: Past research indicates that patients' reports of pain are often met with skepticism and that observers tend to underestimate patients' pain. The mechanisms behind these biases are not yet fully understood. One relevant domain of inquiry is the interaction between the emotional valence of a stranger's expression and the onlooker's trustworthiness judgment. The emotion overgeneralization hypothesis posits that when facial cues of valence are clear, individuals displaying negative expressions (e.g., disgust) are perceived as less trustworthy than those showing positive facial expressions (e.g., happiness). Accordingly, we hypothesized that facial expressions of pain (like disgust) would be judged more untrustworthy than facial expressions of happiness. In two separate studies, we measured trustworthiness judgments of four different facial expressions (i.e., neutral, happiness, pain, and disgust), displayed by both computer-generated and real faces, via both explicit self-reported ratings (Study 1) and implicit motor trajectories in a trustworthiness categorization task (Study 2). Ratings and categorization findings partly support our hypotheses. Our results reveal for the first time that when judging strangers' facial expressions, both negative expressions were perceived as more untrustworthy than happy expressions. They also indicate that facial expressions of pain are perceived as untrustworthy as disgust expressions, at least for computer-generated faces. These findings are relevant to the clinical setting because they highlight how overgeneralization of emotional facial expressions may subtend an early perceptual bias exerted by the patient's emotional facial cues onto the clinician's cognitive appraisal process.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
(Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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