Impression Updating with Multimodal Cues: Dynamics of Face, Voice, and Behavior Integration

A glimpse of a face or a few spoken words is often enough to form impressions. Yet, most research on impression updating has focused on behavioral descriptions, overlooking their inherently multimodal nature and ignoring this aspect of genuine social interactions. Across nine experiments (N = 1919), we demonstrated that impressions based on faces, voices, and behaviors can be updated by sequentially presented cross-modal cues of opposing valence—particularly when initially negative facial impressions were followed by positive vocal cues (Experiments 1–4). Positive voices also reshaped negative face representations generated via reverse correlation, both under intentional and spontaneous impression formation conditions (Experiments 5–6). To explain these effects, we examined perceived diagnosticity of faces versus voices, as well as participants’ explicit beliefs about their relative diagnostic value, but the results were mixed (Experiments 7–9). Together, these findings highlight the dynamic nature of impression updating, underscore the uniquely powerful role of voice, and offer an initial test of potential underlying mechanisms, opening promising directions for future research.