Collova Jemma R, Sutherland Clare Am, Jeffery Linda, Bothe Ellen, Rhodes Gillian
School of Psychological Science, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia.
School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2020 Dec;73(12):2328-2347. doi: 10.1177/1747021820957575. Epub 2020 Sep 23.
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, for images presented either 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.
民间智慧告诫人们不要“以貌取人”。然而，面部第一印象会影响人们对他人的行为，所以我们了解这些印象是否准确至关重要。理解对儿童面部的印象尤为重要，因为这些印象在儿童关键的发育阶段可能会产生社会影响。在此，我们研究了在儿童面部印象中差异最大的两个特质——友善和害羞——的准确性。我们收集了86名儿童（4至11岁）的面部图像以及其父母对他们实际友善/害羞程度的报告。同一个人的不同图像可能会导致不同的印象，因此我们采用了一种新颖的方法，从每个孩子的五张图像中获取印象。这些图像是自然环境下拍摄的，代表了面部的自然变化。成年陌生人对面部的友善程度（研究1）或害羞程度（研究2）进行评分。对于同一个孩子的不同图像，无论这些图像是单独呈现还是作为一组同时呈现，友善印象都有一定程度的准确性。而对于单独或成组呈现的图像，害羞印象并不准确。总之，这些结果表明成年人从儿童面部获得的友善印象有一定准确性，但害羞印象并非如此。此外，我们的结果表明，这种准确性可以通过包含面部自然变化的图像来体现，并且适用于同一个孩子面部的不同图像。这些结果促使未来研究探索儿童面部友善印象与友善行为之间联系的线索和因果机制。
