The impact of face trustworthiness on time estimation

Although humans have the capacity to accurately estimate time, time representations are vulnerable to context and prone to distortions. Previous research has shown that emotional stimuli can provoke such alterations, but little is known about how trustworthiness evaluations interact with time estimation. Trustworthiness is a social dimension that can be nearly instantly inferred from faces, and it has been known to guide people’s behavior and perceptions. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of trustworthiness evaluations on time estimation and further explore this relationship. We hypothesized that there would be an effect, and similarly to emotion research, time would be overestimated when paired with untrustworthy faces. To this end, we conducted an experiment that comprised a time bisection task and a face evaluation task, displaying facial stimuli varying on trustworthiness levels for a range of temporal intervals from 400 ms to 1600 ms. The results revealed that, whereas the participants’ trustworthiness evaluations were consistent, their time estimation did not seem to be significantly affected by them. This could be a reflex of the stimuli not having motivated participants enough to approach or withdraw as much as they would in an ecological scenario. Still, future studies are required to investigate this relationship, using additional contextual information. For its clinical relevance and adaptive nature of its functionality (because it promotes human’s survival in threatening, unknown situations), the study of how face trustworthiness and time estimation may be interconnected provides a promising avenue of interdisciplinary research. Key words: trustworthiness, time perception, social judgment.