Research Interests

Our research interests center on, but are not limited to, social cognition and aging.

Social Cognition

Social cognition is a generic term for various mental processes that support human social behavior. It includes, for example, inferences about others’ feelings, thoughts, and personalities, cost-benefit analysis of one’s own actions, decision making on whether to trust and cooperate with others, and so on. Our current work addresses in particular how people make first impressions of others from limited information (e.g., facial appearance) and how people elaborate the impressions by integrating multiple cues. We’ve been also studying emotion recognition from facial expressions.

Aging

Research has increasingly revealed that aging has complex effects on psychological functioning; the effects substantially differ depending on the particular kinds of mental processes, contexts, and motivational and individual-difference factors. Our lab is especially interested in understanding impacts of aging on various aspects of social cognition and seek to identify strategies for a “successful aging society”.

Representative Studies

• Suzuki, A. (2018). Persistent reliance on facial appearance among older adults when judging someone's trustworthiness. Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 73 (4), 573–583. Abstract

When judging someone’s trustworthiness, facial appearance is a salient but nondiagnostic cue. Such judgments should thus ideally be based on the memory of that person’s past behaviors during social interaction. This behavioral study indicates that compared with younger adults, older adults have greater difficulty in adjusting their judgments of someone’s trustworthiness according to his/her past behaviors and instead persistently rely on his/her facial appearance.

• Suzuki, A., Tsukamoto, S., & Takahashi, Y. (2019). Faces tell everything in a just and biologically determined world: Lay theories behind face reading. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10 (1), 62-72. Abstract

This study investigated a lay belief that various traits can be inferred from faces, which we termed physiognomic belief. Surveys conducted in Japan and the United States consistently showed that this belief is positively associated with a biologically deterministic view of personality traits and a belief in a just world. The results suggest two types of naive justifications for the physiognomic belief: faces and traits should be related because they are both manifestations of biological essences and because the world is an orderly place wherein people get faces they deserve.

Please see Publications for a full list of our publications.