Expecting Happy Women, Not Detecting the Angry Ones: Detection and Perceived Intensity of Facial Anger, Happiness, and Emotionality

Abstract

Faces provide cues for judgments regarding the emotional state of individuals. Using signal-detection methodology and a standardized stimulus set, the overall aim of the present dissertation was to investigate the detection of emotional facial expressions (i.e., angry and happy faces) with neutral expressions as the nontarget stimuli. Study I showed a happy-superiority effect and a bias towards reporting happiness in female faces. As work progressed, questions arose regarding whether the emotional stimuli were equal with regard to perceived strength of emotion, and whether the neutral faces were perceived as neutral. To further investigate the effect of stimulus quality on the obtained findings, Study II was designed such that the facial stimuli were rated on scales of happy-sad, angry-friendly, and emotionality. Results showed that 'neutral' facial expressions were not rated as neutral, and that there was a greater perceived distance between happy and neutral faces than between angry and neutral faces. These results were used to adjust the detectability measures to compensate for the varying distances of the angry and happy stimuli from the neutral stimuli in the emotional space. The happysuperiority effect was weakened, while an angry-female disadvantage remained. However, as these results were based upon different participant groups for detection and emotional rating, Study III was designed to investigate whether the results from Studies I and II could be replicated in a design where the same participants performed both tasks. Again, the results showed the non-neutrality of 'neutral' expressions and that happiness was more easily detected than anger, as shown in general emotion as well as specific emotion detection. Taken together, the overall results of the present dissertation demonstrate a happy-superiority effect that was greater for female than male faces, that angry-female faces were the most difficult to detect, and a bias to report female faces as happy.

Untitled

“…Finally, although sex differences in emotion recognition were not observed in paradigms that presented stimuli for less than 100 msec. (Grimshaw et al, 2004;Neath & Itier, 2014;Pixton, 2011), contrary to studies that detected sex differences with longer presentation times (Collington et al, 2009;Mclure, 2000;Pinto et al, 2013), in the present study sex differences did not vary as a function of time exposure. However, 200 msec.…”

“…In fact, contrary to the notion that male are prone to more easily process anger (Williams & Mattingley, 2006), the present findings demonstrated that women performed better in the recognition of anger than men. Hence, this result is somewhat in line with previous findings showing that both females and males are better at detecting angry faces compared to happy and neutral faces (Pixton, 2011;Sawada et al, 2014).…”

“…Notably, another study that also used a paradigm in which the presentation time of stimuli was very fast (30 msec.) did not find sex differences for the detection of happy and angry faces either (Pixton, 2011).…”

“…Moreover, some inconsistencies are likely the result of distinct methodological manipulations. For example, some studies did not assess the same number of basic emotions (Grimshaw et al, 2004;Neath & Itier, 2014;Pixton, 2011;Sawada et al, 2014), or did not use a paradigm that is able to assess and compare different presentation times of stimuli (such as exposures ranging from 30 to 200 msec vs 500 msec. to 1000 msec.)…”

“…It was also expected that men would present greater accuracy in the recognition of anger. Moreover, given that no gender differences were found when fast presentation of stimuli was used (Grimshaw et al, 2004;Kirouac & Doré, 1984;Pixton, 2011), and given that regardless of gender, performance in the recognition of facial emotions tend to increase as the presentation time also increases (Neath & Itier, 2014), it was hypothesized that gender differences would not vary according to time exposure.…”