Face the Facts

First impressions are rarely built on physical appearance alone. Knowledge about a person's character or actions influences how we perceive them. The Social and Organizational Psychology Group (Ursula Hess) investigated how different forms of such a top-down person knowledge modulate the “happy face advantage”, which is the speed recognition bias where positive facial expressions are categorized faster than negative ones. In the first experiment, they demonstrated that social statements directly affect expression recognition: participants recognized happy expressions significantly faster than angry ones on faces of posers who made positive statements, while this recognition advantage disappeared for posers who made negative statements. In their second and third experiment they revealed that altering a poser's evaluative valence fails to alter speeded expression recognition, despite successfully changing explicit likability and pleasantness ratings. These findings challenge the traditional evaluative congruence account by showing that a shift in general valence or liking is insufficient to influence expression recognition. Instead, expression perception is selectively influenced by specific, socially meaningful person knowledge. If you are interested to learn more about it, read the Article in Cognition and Emotion.

Abstract

Pleasant facial expressions, like happiness, are recognised faster than negative expressions such as anger or fear. The size of this happy face advantage depends on facial social category cues (larger for female, young or ethnic ingroup faces), facial attractiveness (larger for attractive faces), and person knowledge (larger for persons believed to be of good character). These findings are best explained by the evaluative congruence account, which holds that positive expressions are recognised faster when shown by relatively more positively evaluated posers. Experiment 1 showed that happiness is recognised faster than anger for posers who made positive statements about the participant or another person, but not for posers who made negative statements. Experiments 2–3 assessed whether these findings were due to evaluative conditioning (EC), which can shift poser evaluations by pairing poser images with positive or negative pictures or words. Although Experiments 2 and 3 successfully altered poser evaluations, there was no effect on expression recognition. These findings are not consistent with the evaluative congruence account and suggest that different types of knowledge about a person (what someone did, said or likes/hates), which all alter poser evaluation, differ in their effect on socially relevant processes such as expression perception.