Do Trustworthy and Untrustworthy Faces Lead to Subjective Estimation of Time?

The trustworthiness evaluation of others’ faces helps people to understand others’ behaviors and intentions, and to make predictions about other individuals based on those attributions. Therefore, the main goal of the research is to see whether the trustworthy and untrustworthy attributions to faces cause a bias in the subjective evaluation of time, in which shortened or lengthened on the temporal estimation according to the nature of the stimulus. Although many researchers have investigated face trustworthiness, the main focus of this thesis is whether this dimension can affect time perception. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the subjective estimation of time depending on the trustworthy and untrustworthy faces. We hypothesized that the trustworthy and untrustworthy faces would lead to bias in temporal estimation, therefore, the duration of trustworthy faces would be underestimated while the duration of untrustworthy faces would be overestimated or underestimated. Participants were shown faces and a time bisection task was used by asking them to rate the duration of faces as short or long, and then rated each face according to its level of trustworthiness. As a result of the research, there was no significant relationship between the trustworthiness level and temporal estimations. To conclude, trustworthiness judgment does not affect the time perception as a result of very robust null effect. Possible explanations of the results are that trustworthiness was not explicit dimension when performing the task and inducing strong stimuli on perceiver is hard.