Van Der Biest, Mathias and Cracco, Emiel and Riva, Paolo and Valentini, Elia (2023) Should I trust you? Investigating trustworthiness judgements of painful facial expressions. Acta Psychologica, 235. p. 103893. DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2023.103893
Van Der Biest, Mathias and Cracco, Emiel and Riva, Paolo and Valentini, Elia (2023) Should I trust you? Investigating trustworthiness judgements of painful facial expressions. Acta Psychologica, 235. p. 103893. DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2023.103893
Van Der Biest, Mathias and Cracco, Emiel and Riva, Paolo and Valentini, Elia (2023) Should I trust you? Investigating trustworthiness judgements of painful facial expressions. Acta Psychologica, 235. p. 103893. DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2023.103893
Abstract
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.
Item Type: | Article |
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Uncontrolled Keywords: | Trustworthiness; Pain perception; Mouse tracking |
Subjects: | Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > ZZ OA Fund (articles) |
Divisions: | Faculty of Science and Health Faculty of Science and Health > Psychology, Department of |
SWORD Depositor: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
Depositing User: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
Date Deposited: | 05 Apr 2023 08:24 |
Last Modified: | 16 May 2024 21:46 |
URI: | http://repository.essex.ac.uk/id/eprint/35266 |
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Filename: VanDerBiestEtAl_PainExpress_AP_23.pdf
Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0