A Cross-Cultural Study of Schizotypy and Trait Judgments

Rapid and accurate judgments of social traits from faces are indispensable to successful interpersonal interactions. Anomalous trait judgment has been observed in the schizophrenia spectrum and may lead to delusion formation and reduced social functioning. Furthermore, individual differences in social trait judgments are likely to be influenced by culture and gender. The current study investigated the role of culture and schizotypal personality traits on rapid trait judgments from faces in age-matched college student samples from China and the US using a trait judgment task and a battery of self-report questionnaires. We found no relationship between schizotypy and trait judgments. However, positive schizotypy, disorganized schizotypy, cognitive empathy, and affective empathy were higher in Chinese students than in American students. We also found lower level of consummatory interpersonal pleasure among Chinese students. These findings indicated that individuals from Chinese and North American cultures differ in their tendency to make mental inferences during social interactions, as well as in how much they enjoy social interactions. These differences potentially pointed to the relative cultural specificity of the schizotypal personality construct, as well as the need for culturally specific symptom measures and diagnostic criteria. A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY OF SCHIZOTYPY AND TRAIT JUDGMENTS 2 Introduction The idea that personality can be judged from one’s face is not novel. Rather, it could be found in many ancient or modern cultures, with its culmination being the 19 th century physiognomy, the pseudoscience of reading one’s personality from facial features. Even though the pseudoscience of physiognomy and its prescriptive value have since been discredited, and correctly so, modern empirical studies have shown that people do make judgments about certain personal characteristics of unfamiliar faces even after only minimal exposure. In one study conducted by Willis and Todorov (2006), participants were shown unfamiliar neutral faces for 100ms, 500ms, or 1000ms, and were asked to rate their impressions of these faces on various traits such as trustworthiness and aggressiveness. Results from this study showed that as short as 100ms of exposure to an unfamiliar face is more than enough for the viewer to form a reliable impression, and judgments made after 500ms or 1000ms of exposure only differed from minimal exposure judgments with respect to viewers’ confidence levels. Later studies have not only replicated this finding, but also found that people are able to form an impression regarding traits (or judge traits) of a face after 34 ms, suggesting that automatic processes were likely involved in these evaluations and that such a phenomenon was potentially evolutionarily rooted (Todorov, Olivola, Dotsch, & Mende-Siedlecki, 2015). In support of this hypothesized involvement of rapid automatic processes, it has been shown that one important contributing factor to the rapid formation of trait inferences is the faces’ structural resemblance to emotional expressions. In one study (2009), Said, Sebe, and Todorov asked participants to rate emotionally neutral faces on a set of fourteen traits such as “sociable”, “attractive”, “trustworthy”, and “aggressive”. The researchers then trained a Bayesian Network classifier to categorize, or “recognize”, emotional expressions by comparing a set of A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY OF SCHIZOTYPY AND TRAIT JUDGMENTS 3 landmarks from each face to a prototypical neutral face created from averaging 1000 frontal neutral faces. The face stimuli used in the behavioral task were then submitted to this classifier, and the output posterior probabilities of each face to be a certain emotion given by the classifier were used in a correlational analysis with the trait judgment scores given by the human subjects in the behavioral task. Results from this analysis showed that judgment scores on positively valenced traits such as “responsible” and caring were positively correlated with the probabilities of the faces to be classified as happy, whereas scores on negatively valenced traits such as “mean” and “weird” were positively correlated with the probabilities of the faces to be classified as disgust or fear, and scores on “threatening” and “dominant” were positively correlated with the probabilities of an anger classification. These findings went to show that a similar process might be underlying rapid trait judgments and emotion recognition from faces, as well as to suggest the possibility that deficits in one of these tasks implicated similar deficits in the other. One population that has been consistently and robustly shown to exhibit deficits in facial emotion recognition is patients with schizophrenia. One study (Kohler et al., 2003) found patients to be significantly impaired in the recognition of all emotional expressions, and that patients benefited less from increased intensity of the expressions than healthy controls did. Furthermore, it was also found in this study that such a facial emotion recognition deficit was particularly pronounced for negative emotions such as fear and disgust. Another study, which purported to examine the progression of facial emotion recognition deficits throughout the course of schizophrenia, found the deficits in recognizing negative emotions to be present in prodromal, first episode, as well as multiple-episode schizophrenic patients (Comparelli et al., 2013). Moreover, even though all clinical groups performed significantly worse when compared to healthy controls, there was no significant difference among the clinical groups. This finding was A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY OF SCHIZOTYPY AND TRAIT JUDGMENTS 4 interpreted as an indication that emotion recognition deficits are present early and remain stable throughout the course of schizophrenia. More comprehensively, a recent meta-analysis of eighty six studies on the topic concluded that there are large deficits of emotion perception in schizophrenia regardless of the types of task used (Kohler, Walker, Martin, Healey, & Moberg, 2010). It could be predicted, therefore, that patients with schizophrenia would also exhibit patterns of rapid trait judgments that differ from the healthy population. Such a problem is not only scientifically intriguing, but also has significant clinical importance. Schizophrenia has recently been assessed as one of the world’s most debilitating disorders (Salomon et al., 2012). A portion of the impairment in functional outcomes could be attributed to the well-established deficits in social cognitive functions in patients with schizophrenia. One social cognitive process that potentially contributes to mitigated social outcome is the rapid formation of first impression, as trait inferences have been shown to have important social consequences. In the realm of political decisions and leadership selection, one review reported that electoral preferences and appearance-based judgments of competence and dominance were robustly correlated across different countries including the US, France, Japan, New Zealand, and the UK (Olivola & Todorov, 2010). Appearance–based judgments of trustworthiness have also been shown to impact economic and judicial decision making. In laboratory studies using economic games, people were less likely to trust and invest in people who were judged to be less trustworthy based on appearance, even when records of trustworthy behaviors were presented. Moreover, the same kind of influence seems to appear in the courtroom. Defendants with faces rated as untrustworthy were shown to be more likely to receive guilty verdicts even when evidence suggested otherwise. Outside of these two domains, social-trait judgments from faces were also shown to influence A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY OF SCHIZOTYPY AND TRAIT JUDGMENTS 5 mating preferences -even beyond perceived attractiveness (Todorov, Olivola, Dotsch, & Mende-Siedlecki, 2015). A better understanding of how patients with schizophrenia make rapid trait judgments differently from the healthy population could help researchers further decipher the origin of social functional deficits in schizophrenia, and potentially inform future developments of behavioral interventions. Indeed, researchers have recently begun to study rapid social-trait judgment in schizophrenic patients. Most of the studies have hypothesized that under a short period of exposure, patients with schizophrenia will rate faces differently than healthy controls. Even though such a hypothesis seemed reasonable given schizophrenic patients’ established deficits in emotion recognition and, more broadly, socio-cognitive functions in general (Pinkham, Penn, Perkins, & Lieberman, 2003), the results have been inconclusive. In one study, individuals with schizophrenia and healthy controls were asked to rate the trustworthiness of 120 grayscale faces. The results from this study indicated that patients, when compared with healthy controls, tended to rate faces as more trustworthy, especially those faces rated as untrustworthy by the controls. Moreover, the same pattern of bias was also present in healthy siblings of schizophrenic patients, albeit to a lesser extent (Baas, van’t Wout, Aleman, & Kahn, 2008). However, in a replication study conducted by the same research team, researchers failed to find significant difference between the trustworthiness rating obtained from patients and controls (Baas et al., 2008). Some researchers proposed that these mixed findings are due to the heterogeneity of schizophrenic symptoms, and that researchers should therefore focus on the relation between social judgment and specific symptoms rather than the diagnostic category, per se. In support of this claim, McIntosh et al. (2014) found that social trait judgment correlates with delusional ideations differently in patients and controls. In patients, the higher the level of delusional ideations, the A CROSS-