AUTHOR=Mendonça Rita , Garrido Margarida V. , Semin Gün R. 

TITLE=Social Inferences From Faces as a Function of the Left-to-Right Movement Continuum

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2020

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01488

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01488

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=We examined whether reading and writing habits known to drive agency perception also shape the attribution of other agency-related traits, particularly for faces oriented congruently with script direction. Participants rated front-oriented, left-oriented and right-oriented faces on 14 dimensions. These ratings were reduced to two dimensions: power and social-warmth. Both dimensions were systematically affected by head orientation. Right-oriented faces generated a stronger endorsement of the power dimension (e.g., agency, dominance), and, to a lesser extent, of the social-warmth dimension, relative to the left and frontal-oriented faces. Target gender systematically affected social-warmth scores for female targets only on communal traits (e.g., valence, warmth). These results carry implications for the representation of people in space particularly in marketing and political contexts. Face stimuli and respective norming data are available at www.osf.io/v5jpd.