An investigation of how gender shapes the appearance and judgment of apologetic faces

Do people have mental representations of what apologetic faces look like? Do representations differ by gender? We used reverse correlation to (a) generate images that approximate mental representations of apologetic faces, (b) determine whether these images are rated highly on apology-related characteristics, and (c) see if ratings differ by gender of the image generator, target face, and/or image rater. Faces generated from male and female base faces to look apologetic were rated as more apologetic, remorseful, and sad than the base face, demonstrating these mental representations can be approximated using reverse correlation. Findings suggest visually represented apologies express multiple apology-related characteristics. Study 2 revealed the visual templates of faces generated by the gender ingroup appeared more apologetic than those of the gender outgroup; women-generated female faces were most apologetic, and men-generated female faces were least apologetic. Findings highlight gender differences in mental representation, but not perception, of female apologetic faces.