Faces in-between: Evaluations reflect the interplay of facial features and task-dependent fluency

Piotr Winkielman , Michał Olszanowski , Mateusz Gola

Abstract

Facial features influence social evaluations. For example, faces receive higher ratings on attractiveness and trustworthiness when they have more smiling features, and also more female features. However, the influence of such features on evaluations should be qualified by the evaluative consequences of ease or difficulty (fluency) in processing such features. Further, fluency, and its evaluative effects, should depend on whether the specific features elicit fluency, or disfluency, in the context of the current task. In three experiments, participants saw faces varying in expressions ranging from pure anger, through mixed expression, to pure happiness. Perceivers first categorized faces either on a control dimension, or an emotional dimension (angry/happy). The emotional categorization task made “pure” expressions fluent and “mixed” expressions disfluent. Next, participants made social evaluations. Results show that after emotional categorization, but not control categorization, mixed targets are relatively devalued. Further, this effect is mediated by categorization disfluency. Additional data show that on the basic, physiological level, affective devaluation of mixed expressions is driven by their objective ambiguity. Finally, the last experiment demonstrates parallel devaluation effects with faces varying in gender ambiguity.