The “Happy Face Killer” in the eyes of the beholder: relational encoding of facial emotions in context influences trustworthiness attributions

Research on face perception has established that faces surrounded by threatening contexts are perceived as less trustworthy. Moreover, recent studies revealed that such a face-context integration effect is moderated by the nature of the relational qualifier connecting the face and the context: presenting a face as belonging to either the perpetrator or the victim of the threatening context changes its perceived trustworthiness. Here, we asked whether relational qualifiers can also be extracted from subtle facial cues. In two preregistered studies (N = 225), we tested whether face-context integration is qualified by facial emotions. In Experiment 1, faces appeared with either happy or fearful emotional expressions in threatening contexts (vs. no context). Facial emotions moderated face-context integration: The negative impact of contextual threat on attributed trustworthiness showed stronger for happy than fearful faces. In Experiment 2, participants judged the emotional stimuli on both trustworthiness and smartness. Emotions altered face-context integration when judging trustworthiness but did not alter smartness judgments. Moreover, participants' tendency to judge happy faces in threatening contexts as less trustworthy correlated with their belief that the target face belonged to the criminal on the scene. The importance of considering relational encoding when studying person perception is discussed.