Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: INTRODUCTION: Facial expressions play a crucial role in social interactions, influencing trust, and decision-making. In negotiations, threatening expressions may convey dominance or hostility, potentially reducing cooperation. This study explores how threatening facial expressions and autistic traits (ATs) affect social decision-making in the Ultimatum Game (UG), focusing on their main effects on UG offers. METHOD: Fifty adults participated in the study. A Linear Mixed Model (LMM) was conducted to analyze the main effects of threat level and ATs on UG proposals. In addition, eye-tracking technology was used to investigate participants' visual attention toward different facial areas. RESULTS: The results revealed a significant main effect of threatening facial expressions, as participants made lower offers in response to high-threat faces. However, ATs did not show a significant main effect on UG proposals. Eye-tracking data showed that participants focused more on the eyes of high-threat faces compared to low-threat faces. CONCLUSION: These findings support the Emotion-as-Social-Information (EASI) model, suggesting that emotional expressions, particularly threatening ones, influence negotiation behavior. The study enhances understanding of how facial cues and individual differences in ATs affect cooperation and decision-making in social interactions.
Source: Brain and Behavior
DOI: 10.1002/brb3.70461
Authors: Mohammad Hossein Majidi, Khatereh Borhani
Institution: Shahid Beheshti University
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,630
OpenAlex ID: W4409241263