Facial threat affects trust more strongly than facial attractiveness in women than it does in men

Trust is essential in initiating social relationships. Due to the differential evolution of sex hormones as well as the fitness burdens of producing offspring, evaluations of a potential mating partner’s trustworthiness likely differ across sexes. Here, we explore unknown sex-specific effects of facial attractiveness and threat on trusting other-sex individuals. Ninety-three participants (singles; 46 women) attracted by the other sex performed an incentivized trust game. They had to decide whether to trust individuals of the other sex represented by a priori-created face stimuli gradually varying in the intensities of both attractiveness and threat. Male and female participants trusted attractive and unthreatening-looking individuals more often. However, whereas male participants’ trust behavior was affected equally by attractiveness and threat, female participants’ trust behavior was more strongly affected by threat than by attractiveness. This indicates that a partner’s high facial attractiveness might compensate for high facial threat in male but not female participants. Our findings suggest that men and women prioritize attractiveness and threat differentially, with women paying relatively more attention to threat cues inversely signaling parental investment than to attractiveness cues signaling reproductive fitness. This difference might be attributable to an evolutionary, biologically sex-specific decision regarding parental investment and reproduction behavior.

The Effects of Time Pressure on Temporal Overestimation Due to Threat

How does emotion change the way we perceive time? Studies have shown that we overestimate the duration of faces that express anger of fear–an effect that has been explained as due the speeding of a pacemaker that resides within an internal clock. Here, we test the idea that attending longer to facial threat leads to an overestimation of time. Seventy participants (16 male) estimated the duration of angry, fearful and neutral expressions under conditions designed to either reduce attention to time (by emphasising speedy responses) or lengthen attention to time (by emphasising accuracy). Results were modelled using Bayesian Multilevel Logistic Regression. The results replicate previous findings: speed emphasis reduced temporal sensitivity and led to both a higher overall proportion of long responses and faster reaction times. Facial threat attenuated the drop in temporal sensitivity due to speed instructions supporting the idea that people prolong attention to threat (even when they are not directly instructed to do so). We relate the findings to research into attention bias to threat and more broadly to models of perceptual decision making.