Individual differences in emotion regulation and face recognition

Abstract

Face recognition ability is highly variable among neurologically intact populations. Across three experiments, this study examined for the first time associations between individual differences in a range of adaptive versus maladaptive emotion regulation strategies and face recognition. Using an immediate face-memory paradigm, in which observers had to identify a self-paced learned unfamiliar face from a 10-face target-present/ target-absent line-up, Experiment 1 (N = 42) found high levels of expressive suppression (the ongoing efforts to inhibit emotion-expressive behaviors), but not cognitive reappraisal (the cognitive re-evaluation of emotional events to change their emotional consequences), were associated with a lower level of overall face-memory accuracy and higher rates of misidentifications and false positives. Experiment 2 (N = 53) replicated these finding using a range of face-matching tasks, where observers were asked to match pairs of same-race or different-race face images taken on the same day or during different times. Once again, high levels of expressive suppression were associated with a lower level of overall face-matching performance and higher rates of false positives, but cognitive reappraisal did not correlate with any face-matching measure. Finally, Experiment 3 (N = 52) revealed that the higher use of maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies, especially catastrophizing, was associated with lower levels of overall face-matching performances and higher rates of false positives. All told, the current research provides new evidence concerning the important associations between emotion and cognition.

27. A Lesion-Derived Brain Network for Emotion Regulation

“…Although speculative, this might suggest that lesions causing prosopagnosia would be associated with intact or even improved emotion regulation. This unexpected result is consistent with a recent study showing poor face recognition performance associated with a higher level of emotion regulation 66 . Several limitations in this study should be mentioned here.…”

Reactivity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, but not the amygdala, to negative emotion faces predicts greed personality trait

“…In this study, we leveraged the face-matching task, a paradigm evidenced to be highly efficient and low-cost in time for investigating basic emotional responses, such as fear and angry [50,58,84], without imposing potential domain-specific biases or confounds. This task allowed us to elicit brain reactivity to negative emotional faces and further explore its potential associations with greed.…”

The influence of face masks on emotion recognition and the role of individual differences

“…Ability to recognize emotions from the eye-region may vary depending on social competence and personality, which may dictate social experience or preference for fixating specific facial features. As different individual factors have been shown to impact emotion recognition under typical circumstances (McKenzie et al 2018;Megreya & Latzman, 2020) such factors may also play a role in emotion recognition under atypical conditions with face occlusion.…”