The Effects Of Verbal Evaluation And Facial Attractiveness On First Impression:an ERP Study

Language has been proposed to function as a context that shapes human cognition.When an individual talks,people can obtain emotional cues from verbal information to make fast inferences about the personality traits of the speaker and further adjust subsequent interpersonal interactions with the speaker.For example,in daily communication,those who criticize others may lead to being disfavored and avoided by others,while those people praising others may lead to being favored and approached by others.Moreover,not only verbal evaluation but also nonverbal characteristics such as appearance,commonly known as “facial attractiveness”,influence people’s first impression of the speaker.Most of the previous studies have focused on the influence of verbal information on first impression but ignored the fact that verbal and nonverbal information are not independent of each other in real social interactions.Therefore,using event-related potentials(ERPs),the present study investigated the interaction between verbal evaluation(praise and criticism)and facial attractiveness and underlying neural mechanisms by manipulating the emotional valence of verbal information and the level of facial attractiveness.The present experiment included 64 adult participants without prosopagnosia symptoms,32 females and 32 males.Approximately half of the male and half of the female participants were randomly assigned to either the group viewing faces of the same gender or the group viewing faces of the opposite gender.In the experiment,participants first viewed either an attractive or an average-looking face and then learned to associate this face with two sentences,both of which were randomly matched to describe positive,negative or neutral verbal information.Subsequently,participants were required to rate the likeability of the individual represented by the face on a 9-point scale.Repeated-measures ANOVAs were conducted to analyze the likeability,ERP components N170 and N300 elicited by face alone and EPN and LPC evoked by critical words that determined the emotional valence of verbal evaluation following the face.Emotional valence of verbal evaluation(positive/negative/neutral)and facial attractiveness(attractive/average-looking)are within-subjects factors and face gender and participant gender are between-subjects factors.Consistent with previous studies,individuals who criticized others were rated lower in likeability relative to those who praised others.Participants rated higher in likeability for attractive individuals than for average-looking individuals,suggesting that the beauty premium effect previously shown does exist.And,this effect was modulated by the emotional valence of verbal evaluation such that the effect was weaker when faces were assigned negative relative to positive and neutral verbal evaluation.Participants rated lower in likeability for attractive male faces than attractive female faces and rated higher in likeability for average-looking male faces than averagelooking female faces,suggesting that face gender modulates the effect of facial attractiveness on first impression.ERP results showed that female participants exhibited larger N170 amplitudes than male participants when faces,particularly average-looking faces,were presented alone.The N300 amplitudes evoked by attractive faces were significantly larger than those evoked by average-looking faces particularly female faces.The EPN and LPC amplitudes evoked by differentially valenced verbal evaluation showed significant main effects of emotion with negative emotion evoking the largest EPN and LPC amplitudes followed by positive emotions and then neutral emotions.Moreover,the emotion effect was modulated by participant gender with more negative EPN amplitudes in female participants compared to male participants responding to positive and negative verbal evaluation;there was no gender difference in the neutral condition.On the other hand,when faces were paired with positive verbal evaluation,the LPCs elicited by attractive individuals were larger than those elicited by average-looking individuals;this attraction effect was not observed in the negative and neutral conditions.Furthermore,the interaction effects of facial attractiveness and verbal evaluation on LPC amplitudes varied with participant and face gender showing main differences when males and females were viewing faces of the same or different gender.The correlational results related to questionnaire scores showed that the likeability for attractive faces paired with neutral verbal evaluation decreased when participants’ depression level,negative emotional state and perceived stress were higher;when average-looking faces were paired with negative verbal evaluation,greater perceived stress was associated with lower likability and larger EPN amplitudes.In the correlations between behavioral and ERP results,larger EPN was associated with higher likeability when male participants viewed average-looking faces of the same gender paired with neutral verbal descriptions.When female participants viewed attractive faces of the opposite gender paired with positive verbal evaluation,larger LPC amplitudes were associated with higher likeability.This study investigated in a sentence context the role of verbal evaluation and facial attractiveness in first impression,which provides behavioral and neural evidence for the interaction of verbal and nonverbal information in social interactions.The findings may also shed light on the facilitation of good personal impressions and social interactions.