Abstract

The discrimination between trustworthy and untrustworthy faces is an automatic and rapid process with a strong adaptive meaning. The present study aims to investigate the nature of the visual information trustworthiness perception relies on by selectively removing different portions of high and low spatial frequencies. By participating in an online task, adult participants judged trustworthiness intensity expressed by high and low trustworthy female faces under five spatial filtering conditions. Results show that, although both high and low spatial frequencies provide sufficient cues for discriminating between trustworthy and untrustworthy faces, trustworthiness judgments are more accurate when only low spatial frequencies are available in the stimuli. Results are discussed with reference to the literature on emotion discrimination