The Development Of Facial Expression Authenticity Recognition Ability And Its Impact On Interpersonal Trus

Facial expressions provide rich information in daily interpersonal interactions.Recognizing the authenticity of others’ facial expressions helps people make appropriate responses in interactions and use information about others’ expressions to protect themselves and avoid emotional traps,which is especially important for elementary school children.It is currently controversial whether children in early elementary school have the ability to recognize the authenticity of facial expressions,and it is not clear how the recognition ability develops during the elementary school stage.After recognizing the authenticity of another person’s expressions,people infer the behavioral intentions and personality traits of the other person based on the recognition results and adjust their behavioral responses.It has been found that expression authenticity affects people’s behavioral decisions and trust in others in different situations,but the effect of expression authenticity with different validity on trust decisions and its underlying psychological mechanisms need to be further explored.Therefore,the present study used eye-tracking technology to investigate the development of children’s recognition and gaze preference for facial expression realism of different valence at the elementary school level,and based on this,we used psycho-physiological experiments to further investigate the influence of perception of genuine and posed facial expressions on interpersonal trust and its intrinsic physiological mechanisms.In Experiment 1,a 3(Grade: low vs.medium vs.high)× 2(authenticity type:genuine vs.posed)× 2(expression type: happy vs.sad)three-factor mixed experimental design was adopted.The facial expression authenticity recognition task was used to investigate the ability of 64 elementary school children in different grades to recognize the authenticity of genuine and posed expressions,and the eye-tracking technique was used to investigate the eye-movement characteristics while discriminating the authenticity of expressions.The results revealed that elementary school children were able to recognize the authenticity of happy expressions,but were less effective in recognizing sad expressions,especially real sad expressions.In addition,elementary school children’s recognition ability improved with grade level,and they paid most attention to cues in the eye area during recognition.In Experiment 2,a mixed experimental design was used to randomly select 50 college students and use a trust game task to explore the effects of expressions with different validity and authenticity on interpersonal trust between male and female college students,and to record physiological information when people observe different expressions and observe the effects of expression authenticity on people’s physiological arousal.The results showed that people trusted others with happy expressions more than sad expressions,trusted others with real expressions more than fake expressions,and real expressions caused higher physiological arousal than fake expressions.From the above experimental results,we can see that elementary school children have the ability to recognize facial authenticity,and the higher the grade level,the stronger the recognition ability of children.The ability to recognize the authenticity of happy expressions was higher than that of sad expressions.In addition,different facial expression authenticity does affect people’s interpersonal trust level,and people trust happy expressions and genuine expressions more,and the physiological arousal of genuine expressions is stronger.