Look into my eyes: Attentional bias to facial expressions predict mechanisms of gullibility
Look into my eyes: Attentional bias to facial expressions predict mechanisms of gullibility
StatusVoR
Alternative title
Authors
Szpak, Zuzanna
Tyrzyk, Aleksandra
Parzuchowski, MichaĆ
Monograph
Monograph (alternative title)
Date
2025-12-22
Publisher
Journal title
Polish Psychological Bulletin
Issue
Volume
56
Pages
Pages
160-170
ISSN
0079-2993
ISSN of series
Access date
2025-12-22
Abstract PL
Abstract EN
This eye-tracking study aimed to explore the relationship between levels of gullibility and attentional allocation to threatening facial expressions. Using a dot-probe paradigm with concurrent eye-tracking, we found a distinct dissociation in how gullible versus non-gullible individuals process angry and neutral faces. While non-gullible participants demonstrated typical avoidance behaviors toward angry expressions, highly gullible individuals exhibited prolonged fixation on these social threat signals. These contrasting attentional patterns suggest that gullibility may fundamentally involve an insensitivity to cues of untrustworthiness rather than merely susceptibility to persuasion. Gullible individuals appear to lack the typical protective response of looking away from threatening social signals. These findings reveal how individual differences in gullibility shape basic attentional processes during social threat processing
Abstract other
Keywords PL
Keywords EN
gullibility
attentional bias
social threat processing
eye-tracking
cognitive vulnerability
trustworthiness perception
attentional bias
social threat processing
eye-tracking
cognitive vulnerability
trustworthiness perception