An ERP study on the time course of facial trustworthiness appraisal

The importance of facial trustworthiness for human interaction and communication is difficult to exaggerate. Reflections on daily experience indicate that the presence of a human face elicits rapid appraisals of its trustworthiness. Relatively little is known, however, about the exact brain processes related to this response. In the present study, event-related brain potentials were recorded during trustworthiness appraisals of various emotionally neutral faces. On the one hand, trustworthy faces elicited a more positive C1 than untrustworthy faces; a finding that might be related to initial stages of perceptual processing that categorizes faces on the basis of structural properties. On the other hand, untrustworthy faces elicited a more positive late positive component (LPC) than trustworthy faces, indicating that greater amounts of motivated attention are allocated to faces appearing to be untrustworthy. The LPC effect in this study was consistent with the prediction of the emotion overgeneralization hypothesis of trustworthy face evaluation.