Brief first impressions and trait judgments of faces : the effect of exposure time

• Main Author: Ng, Vione Jing Yi
• Other Authors: Xu Hong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Psychology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/77207
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Many studies have shown the importance of attractiveness, most importantly the evolutionary theory of attraction suggesting that attraction guides the survival of human beings. Perceived facial attractiveness has also been associated with many ratings on traits such as dominance, aggressiveness, competence and trustworthiness. These subsequent trait judgments help us to modulate our behaviours towards strangers and form the basis of relationships. This study focuses not only on the link between perceived trustworthiness and facial attractiveness, but also brings in the possible effects of exposure time on both judgments. As appearance is amongst the first aspects we notice about others, we seek to find out if and how quickly facial perceptions affect our trait perceptions of a novel person and explore the research in this field. We also seek to understand Singaporeans’ conceptual trait space between trustworthiness and attractiveness, which is accountable for some variance in trait judgments. In addition, we attempt to manipulate four different exposure times in this study to find out if trait judgments differ significantly with increased exposure times. Most importantly, reliability and consistency of trait judgments were focused on. This will serve as the first step in probable further studies involving accuracy of facial judgments and spatial frequency.