While perceptions of facial trustworthiness usually serve as our first references for social interactions, these impressions may ultimately turn out to be inaccurate or unreliable. Compared with younger adults, older adults generally face a higher risk of fraudulent exploitation; the characteristics of older adults’ facial trustworthiness perception may play an important role in revealing the underlying mechanism of their being cheated. Previous studies have demonstrated that, in comparison with their younger counterparts, older adults tend to overestimate strangers’ facial trustworthiness. In the present study, two experiments were conducted, aiming at testing (1) the age-related differences in facial trustworthiness perceptions (Experiment 1) and (2) whether any interventions (e.g., encouraging more deliberative processing or more affective processing) could be applied to help older adults reduce their tendency to overestimate trustworthiness, thus reducing their facial trustworthiness ratings to a lower level (Experiment 2). The results indicated that (1) consistent with previous studies, older adults provided higher trustworthiness ratings for unfamiliar faces than did younger adults (Experiment 1) and (2) more importantly, affective processing instead of deliberative processing could benefit older adults in their assessments of facial trustworthiness, leading them toward demonstrating similar—not significantly higher—levels of trust toward strange faces as younger adults (Experiment 2). A possible mechanism was offered, suggesting that affective processing might help older adults to detect negative cues in unfamiliar faces.

虽然对面部可信度的看法通常是我们社交互动的第一参考，但这些印象最终可能会被证明是不准确或不可靠的。与年轻人相比，老年人普遍面临更高的欺诈性剥削风险；老年人的面部可信度特征可能在揭示他们被欺骗的潜在机制中发挥重要作用。先前的研究表明，与年轻人相比，老年人往往高估陌生人面部​​的可信度。在本研究中，进行了两项实验，旨在测试（1）面部可信度感知中与年龄相关的差异（实验1）和（2）是否可以采取任何干预措施（例如，鼓励更多的深思熟虑的处理或更多的情感处理）用于帮助老年人减少高估可信度的倾向，从而将他们的面部可信度评级降低到较低水平（实验2）。结果表明：(1) 与之前的研究一致，老年人对陌生面孔的可信度评分高于年轻人（实验 1）；(2) 更重要的是，情感处理而不是深思熟虑的处理可以使老年人在评估陌生面孔时受益。面部可信度，导致他们对年轻人表现出类似（但没有显着更高）的对陌生面孔的信任程度（实验 2）。提出了一种可能的机制，表明情感处理可能有助于老年人发现陌生面孔中的负面暗示。