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Not afraid to trust you: Trustworthiness moderates gaze cueing but not in highly anxious participants

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/20445911.2014.945457

2044-592X

Felix Süßenbach, Felix D. Schönbrodt,

Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior

AbstractGaze cueing (i.e., the shifting of person B's attention by following person A's gaze) is closely linked with human interaction and learning. To make the most of this connection, researchers need to investigate possible moderators enhancing or reducing the extent of this attentional shifting. In this study we used a gaze cueing paradigm to demonstrate that the perceived trustworthiness of a cueing person constitutes such a moderator for female participants. Our results show a significant interaction between perceived trustworthiness and the response time trade-off between valid and invalid gaze cues [gaze cueing effect (GCE)], as manifested in greater following of a person's gaze if this person was trustworthy as opposed to the following of an untrustworthy person's gaze. An additional exploratory analysis showed potentially moderating influences of trait-anxiety on this interaction (p = .057). The affective background of the experiment (i.e., using positive or negative target stimuli) had no influence.Keywords: Affective backgroundAnxietyGaze cueingModeratorTrustworthiness Supplementary materialSupplementary content is available via the 'Supplementary' tab on the article's online page (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2014.945457).Notes1 This requirement was due to an additional hypothesis in which we predicted that two familiar faces (Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings and Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs) would be naturally and more strongly primed trustworthy or untrustworthy, respectively, and thus participants should show an even bigger difference in GCEs when following – or not following – the gaze of these faces. As we had problems finding enough participants who had seen both movies and as this was just an additional exploratory hypothesis, we relaxed this requirement. Thus, we ended up with 48 out of 60 participants who had seen both movies. However, results regarding these characters are not reported here, as they can only be regarded exploratory since these character's faces could neither be counterbalanced with their corresponding trustworthiness nor could we efficiently control for effects of different degrees of familiarity, which might have had an effect (Deaner et al., Citation2007). Nonetheless, the interested reader finds all the obtained results and our complete dataset in the online supplementary material.