When building personal relationships, it is important to select optimal partners, even based on the first meeting. This study was inspired by the idea that people who smile are considered more trustworthy and attractive. However, this may not always be true in daily life. Previous studies have used a relatively simple method of judging others by presenting a photograph of one person’s face. To move beyond this approach and examine more complex situations, we presented the faces of two people confronted (...) with each other to participants and asked them to judge them from a third-person perspective. Through three experiments, participants were asked to judge which of the two persons was more appropriate for forming alliances, more trustworthy, or more attractive, respectively. In all experiments, images were shown for a short or a long time. In all three experiments, the results showed that participants were more likely to choose persons with happy faces than those with neutral, sad, or angry faces when the image presentation was short. Contrarily, the facial expressions did not affect those judgments when the image presentation was long. Instead, judgments were correlated with personality estimated from the model’s neutral face in a single-person presentation. These results suggest that although facial expressions can affect the judgments of others when observing two-person confrontations from a third-person perspective, when participants have more time to elaborate their judgments, they go beyond expressions. (shrink)

Micro-expression is an extremely quick and uncontrollable facial movement that lasts for 40–200 ms and reveals thoughts and feelings that an individual attempts to cover up. Though much more difficult to detect and recognize, ME recognition is similar to macro-expression recognition in that it is influenced by facial features. Previous studies suggested that facial attractiveness could influence facial expression recognition processing. However, it remains unclear whether facial attractiveness could also influence ME recognition. Addressing this issue, this study tested 38 participants (...) with two ME recognition tasks in a static condition or dynamically. Three different MEs at two attractiveness levels. The results showed that participants recognized MEs on attractive faces much quicker than on unattractive ones, and there was a significant interaction between ME and facial attractiveness. Furthermore, attractive happy faces were recognized faster in both the static and the dynamic conditions, highlighting the happiness superiority effect. Therefore, our results provided the first evidence that facial attractiveness could influence ME recognition in a static condition or dynamically. (shrink)