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The Look that Binds: Partner-Directed Altruistic Motivation and Biased Perception in Married Couples

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Abstract

A trustworthy appearance is regarded as a marker of a globally positive personality and, thus, evokes a host of benevolent responses from perceivers. Nevertheless, it is yet to be determined whether the reverse is also true, that is, whether social targets who evoke unambiguously benign motivations in perceivers are regarded as possessing a more trustworthy appearance (cf. Oosterhof and Todorov in Emotion 9:128–133, 2008). To this end, elderly long-term married couples completed measures of partner-directed altruistic motivation, accommodative behaviors, marital satisfaction, and trust in the partner. They also completed a face-processing task involving spousal and stranger faces 1 year later. Higher motivation to prioritize a spouse’s well-being (but none of the other relationship functioning variables assessed) predicted perceiving one’s spouse’s emotionally neutral face as being more trustworthy-looking. Results are discussed in the context of the reciprocal relationship between higher-order motivational processes and basic perceptual mechanisms in shaping relational climates.

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Notes

  1. The sample is the same as the one used in Petrican et al. (2014). Nevertheless, there is no overlap in the discussed measures, although in the Control Analyses section, we verify that the main predictor variable from Petrican et al., the participants' software-based facial trustworthiness (cf. Oosterhof and Todorov 2008), did not impact our present findings.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research postdoctoral fellowship awarded to Raluca Petrican, a CIHR grant to Cheryl Grady (MOP14036), and the Canada Research Chair program (Tier 1 CRC to C.L.G.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rotman Research Institute, 3560 Bathurst Street, Toronto, ON, M6A 2E1, Canada

    Raluca Petrican

  2. Department of Psychology, 2-N-7 Green Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA

    Alexander Todorov

  3. Department of Psychology, St. Jerome’s University, 290 Westmount Road North, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G3, Canada

    Christopher T. Burris

  4. Department of Psychology, York University and Rotman Research Institute, 3560 Bathurst Street, Toronto, ON, M6A 2E1, Canada

    R. Shayna Rosenbaum

  5. Department of Psychology and Psychiatry, Rotman Research Institute, University of Toronto, 3560 Bathurst Street, Toronto, ON, M6A 2E1, Canada

    Cheryl Grady

Authors
  1. Raluca Petrican
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  2. Alexander Todorov
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  3. Christopher T. Burris
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  4. R. Shayna Rosenbaum
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  5. Cheryl Grady
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Correspondence to Raluca Petrican.

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Petrican, R., Todorov, A., Burris, C.T. et al. The Look that Binds: Partner-Directed Altruistic Motivation and Biased Perception in Married Couples. J Nonverbal Behav 39, 165–179 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0203-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0203-3

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