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The procedure for the attractiveness judgment was similar to that used for the trustworthiness judgment. The participants were instructed to judge facial attractiveness using a 3-point scale with “unattractive / not sure / attractive” (or “attractive / not sure / unattractive,” counterbalanced among participants, and the label “not sure” was interpreted as “neither unattractive nor attractive”); then, the participants continued to rate the degree of unattractiveness or attractiveness on a different 3-point scale with “a little / quite / very” (or “very / quite / a little,” counterbalanced among participants). Thus, combining the two refined scales into a single overall rating scale created a score that ranged from –3 (“very unattractive”) to 3 (“very attractive”), with 0 indicating “neither unattractive nor attractive.”

As expected, our work provides some evidence that facial trustworthiness judgment abilities gradually improve during childhood.

We also found that the relationships between trustworthiness and attractiveness judgments in children groups were significantly weaker than that of the adult group. One explanation for this age effect may be that, facial experience and social experience might serve to refine this link between facial attractiveness and trustworthiness. Unlike adults, children participants are more likely to use unique standards (such as faces that resemble their own or the “look” of an important person) to judge facial trustworthiness rather than the shared standards used across other raters.