Facial impressions of niceness influence children's interpretations of peers' ambiguous behavior.

Children infer personality traits from faces when they are asked explicitly which face appears nice or mean. Less is known about how children use face-trait information implicitly to make behavioral evaluations. We used the Ambiguous Situations Protocol to explore how children use face-trait information to form interpretations of ambiguous situations when the behavior or intention of the target child was unclear. On each trial, children (N = 144, age range = 4-11.95 years; 74 girls, 67 boys, 3 gender not specified; 70% White, 10% other or mixed race, 5% Asian, 4% Black, 1% Indigenous, 9% not specified) viewed a child's face (previously rated high or low in niceness) before seeing the child's face embedded within an ambiguous scene (Scene Task) or hearing a vignette about a misbehavior done by that child (Misbehavior Task). Children described what was happening in each scene and indicated whether each misbehavior was done on purpose or by accident. Children also rated the behavior of each child and indicated whether the child would be a good friend. Facial niceness influenced children's interpretations of ambiguous behavior (Scene Task) by 4 years of age, and ambiguous intentions (Misbehavior Task) by 6 years. Our results suggest that the use of face-trait cues to form interpretations of ambiguous behavior emerges early in childhood, a bias that may lead to differential treatment for peers perceived with a high-nice face versus a low-nice face.

We need to move beyond rating scales, white faces and adult perceivers: Invited Commentary on Sutherland & Young (2022), understanding trait impressions from faces.

Sutherland and Young's perspective is a timely and rigorous examination of trait impressions based on facial cues. We propose three strtegies to further advance the field: incorporating natural language processing, including diverse facial stimuli, and re-interpreting developmental data.

Recognizing, discriminating, and labeling emotional expressions in a free-sorting task: A developmental story.

Recognizing emotional expressions across different people and discriminating between them are important social skills. We examined their development using a novel free-sorting task in which children (aged 5 to 10) and adults sorted 20 faces (posing sadness, anger, fear, and disgust) into piles such that all faces in each pile were feeling the same. Participants could make as many or few piles (emotion categories) as they liked and then labeled each pile. There were no age-related changes in the number of piles made. Children made more confusion errors (two emotions in the same pile) than adults, a pattern that decreased with age. Errors were not random, but disproportionately involved placing fearful faces into piles labeled sad and disgusted faces into piles labeled angry-especially among children who did not produce fear and disgust labels, respectively. Our findings are consistent with differentiation and constructivist models of the development of emotion perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

First impressions of child faces: Facial trustworthiness influences adults' interpretations of children's behavior in ambiguous situations.

Despite the profound behavioral consequences that first impressions of trustworthiness have on adult populations, few studies have examined how adults' first impressions of trustworthiness influence behavioral outcomes for children. Using a novel task design, we examined adults' perceptions of children's behavior in ambiguous situations. After a brief presentation of a child's face (high trust or low trust), participants viewed the child's face embedded within an ambiguous scene involving two children (Scene Task) or read a vignette about a misbehavior done by that child (Misbehavior Task). In the Scene Task, participants described what they believed to be happening in each scene; in the Misbehavior Task, participants indicated whether the behavior was done on purpose or by accident. In both tasks, participants also rated the behavior of the target child and indicated whether that child would be a good friend. In Experiment 1, young adults (n = 61) and older adults (n = 57) viewed unaltered face images. In Experiment 2, young adults (N = 59) completed the same tasks while viewing images of child faces morphed toward high-trust and low-trust averages. In both experiments, ambiguous scenes and misbehaviors were interpreted more positively when the target child had a high-trust face versus a low-trust face, with comparable patterns of results for the two age groups. Collectively, our results demonstrate that a child's facial trustworthiness biases how adults interpret children's behavior-a heuristic that may have lasting behavioral consequences for children through a self-fulfilling prophecy.