Unlocking the Brain

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” may just be the least followed proverbial warning. Instead, we all regularly make spontaneous judgements about who to trust or avoid based on appearance. Although rapid and often implicit, face-based first impressions significantly impact our lives, from dating choices to hiring decisions and election outcomes. Yet, despite their importance across society, knowledge of how we form these impressions is mostly based on White people living in Western countries. In this talk, we will examine how face-based first impressions vary according to ethnicity and culture.

We established how viewing times on a sample of 60 different artworks relate to subjective ratings of artistic value, emotional valence and arousal. Estimates of each painting’s fame featured as an additional control variable. We found that paintings that are judged to be of higher artistic value tend to attract longer viewing times. Independently of this, paintings that are rated as emotionally more negative attract longer viewing times than emotionally more positive paintings. The latter confirms a negativity bias in attending to visual art, implications of which will be discussed.