Em busca de um modelo integrativo dos espaços bidimensionais fundamentais da percepção social baseados em traços e faces.

Funder

Organizational Unit

Publications

The structuring role of valence in the relationship between and within models of face and trait impressions

Publication . Oliveira, Manuel José Barbosa de; Garcia-Marques, Teresa; Garcia-Marques, Leonel; Dotsch, Ron

In social face perception research, trustworthiness and dominance were found as the core dimensions underlying personality impressions based on facial appearance. These dimensions bear a striking resemblance to dimensions found in the parallel domain of person perception research such as the warmth and competence or communion and agency dimensions of personality impressions based on verbal person descriptions (e.g., trait-based descriptions). Given that both types of social information often co-occur in real social interactions and guide social decision making, it becomes crucial to understand how impressions derived from both sources are interrelated. Yet, so far, questions regarding the extent to which the dimensions of social face perception overlap with the dimensions of person perception, and regarding the nature and direction of the interrelationships between these dimensions, have been largely overlooked in the literature. The main goal of this thesis was to fill this gap in the literature and make initial steps towards the integration of social face perception and person perception models of personality impressions. In the first paper, a reverse correlation methodology was used to assess the extent to which dimensions of social face perception were perceived to overlap with dimensions of person perception by perceivers themselves. The results showed that dimensions establishing opposite relationships with valence, such as dominance and competence, were perceived as less similar than dimensions establishing a common positive relationship with valence, such as trustworthiness, warmth, and competence. These findings clarified that the dimensions of facial impressions and of person perception are not always perceived as redundant, and further highlighted the role of valence in shaping the relationship between dimensions across domains. The second paper employed a paradigm designed to directly assess the nature of the relationship that valence establishes with the core dimensions of social face perception and person perception. The results revealed that ability-related trait dimensions such as competence and dominance exhibited more variability in the nature and direction of their relationship with valence, comparatively to dimensions related with morality and warmth. These findings further emphasized that the overlap or dissociation between core dimensions of social judgment is largely driven by the features of the relationship they establish with valence. The third paper focused exclusively on social face perception and used a reverse correlation methodology to investigate how trustworthiness and dominance are naturally integrated into unitary impressions of facial appearance. The results showed that the dimension more strongly related with valence—trustworthiness—outweighed dominance in the resulting impressions of facial appearance. These findings highlight the primary role of valence information in shaping how dimensions are integrated within social face perception. Overall, these findings highlight the primary role of valence in structuring the relationship between dimensions of social judgment, not only across models of person perception and social face perception, but also within each model. Moreover, they offer a clearer picture on the relationship and integration of models of social face perception and person perception, and lay out clear new directions for future research on social perception in general.

2019-12-16Doctoral thesis

Open access

Dominance and competence face to face: Dissociations obtained with a reverse correlation approach

Publication . Oliveira, Manuel; Garcia-Marques, Teresa; Dotsch, Ron; Garcia-Marques, Leonel

The article explores whether the traits representing the dimensions underlying the structure of facial and non-facial impressions are similarly mapped in the face space. Two studies examine whether the trustworthiness-bydominance and the warmth-by-competence two-dimensional models overlap in face perception. In Study 1 (N = 200), we used a reverse-correlation task to obtain classification images (CIs) reflecting how each dimension is mapped onto a face. Results show that the similarity between CIs was higher between warmth and trustworthiness than between competence and dominance. In Study 2 (N = 31) the evaluations of each CI on each social dimension show a higher dissociation between dominance and competence than between trustworthiness and warmth. These results, obtained at both perceptual and judgment levels, suggest that there is only a partial correspondence between the two models that seems to be driven by the relationship that the competence and dominance dimensions establish with valence

2019Journal article

Restricted access