Words or appearance? The impact of verbal behaviour and facial attraction on first impression

Abstract

In social interactions, verbal and nonverbal information often work together to form an impression of a person. Here, we turn to the interplay between verbal behaviour and facial attractiveness, addressing how these social signals co-act in modulating person judgment and concurrent neural activity. Male and female participants viewed same-sex or opposite-sex faces (attractive and average-looking) randomly paired with verbal evaluations (praise, criticism, and neutral) and rated the likeability of the individuals depicted in the face images. Results showed that, as compared to neutral descriptions, praise increased likeability and criticism diminished it. Attractive individuals were rated more likeable than average-looking ones. This attractiveness advantage was significantly reduced when faces were paired with criticism relative to praise or neutral descriptions, while it was not significantly enhanced by praise relative to neutral descriptions. Electrophysiologically, criticism elicited larger LPC responses than neutral descriptions, assigned to either attractive or average-looking faces. Differently, praise enhanced the LPC only when assigned to attractive faces but not to average-looking faces. Concurrently, the LPC amplitudes were larger following attractive relative to average-looking individuals providing praise but not criticism or neutral descriptions. This praise-specific attraction-dependent LPC response was associated with likeability ratings for praising “beauties”. In addition, the interaction between verbal behaviour and facial attraction varied across participant and face sex. Overall, our findings provide behavioural and neural evidence for different but interactive roles of verbal and nonverbal information in social interactions and shed light on the facilitation of favorable person impressions in everyday life.