The impact of emotional expressions on children’s trust judgments

ABSTRACT

Research on the development of selective trust has shown that young children do not indiscriminately trust all potential informants. They are likely to seek and endorse information from individuals who have proven competent or benign in the past. However, research on trust among adults raises the possibility that children might also be influenced by the emotions expressed by potential informants. In particular, they might trust individuals expressing more positive emotion. Indeed, young children’s trust in particular informants based on their past behaviour might be undermined by their currently expressed emotions. To examine this possibility, we tested the selective trust of fifty 4- and 5-year-olds in two steps. We first confirmed that children are likely to invest more trust in individuals expressing more positive emotion. We then showed that even if children have already formed an impression of two potential informants based on their behavioural record, their choices about whose claims to trust are markedly influenced by the degree of positive emotion currently expressed by the two informants. By implication, the facial emotions expressed by potential informants can undermine young children’s selective trust based on the behavioural record of those informants.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust judgment
• emotion
• preschool children
• negativity bias

Acknowledgements

We thank Samuel Ronfard and Ayse Payir for their comments on this manuscript as well as Lijuan Tang for help in collecting the data. Finally, we are grateful to all the children who participated in this research, and to the teachers at the Xiasha Shiyan Kindergarten, Hangzhou.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the MoE Project of Key Research Institutes of Humanities and Social Science at Universities [grant numbers 14JJD190003, 16JJD880007].