The Influence of Face Inversion and Spatial Frequency on the Self-Positive Expression Processing Advantage

Abstract

Previous research has examined the impact of late self-evaluation, ignoring the impact of the early visual coding stage and the extraction of facial identity information and expression information on the self-positive expression processing advantage. From the perspective of the processing course, this study examined the stability of the self-positive expression processing advantage and revealed its generation mechanism. In Experiment 1, inverted self-expression and others’ expressive pictures were used to influence early structural coding. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we used expression pictures of high and low spatial frequency, thereby affecting the extraction of facial identity information or expression information in the mid-term stage. The visual search paradigm was adopted in three experiments, asking subjects to respond to the target expression. We found that under the above experimental conditions, the search speed for self-faces was always faster than that for self-angry expressions and others’ faces. These results showed that, compared with others’ expressions and self-angry expressions, self-positive expressions were more prominent and more attractive. These findings suggest that self-expression recognition combines with conceptual self-knowledge to form an abstract and constant processing pattern. Therefore, the processing of self-expression recognition was not affected by the facial orientation and spatial frequencies.

Early Capture of Attention by Self-Face: Investigation Using a Temporal Order Judgment Task

“…Participants show greater number of fixations on self-face compared to familiar faces, indicating a greater featural processing for self-face ( Hills, 2018 ). More evidence for this idea comes from the observed lack of face inversion effect for self-faces ( Yin et al., 2018 ), suggesting featural processing as one of the possible reasons for SFA. Interestingly, they report a decrease in SFA for inverted faces in adults (even though the advantage is intact for upright faces), suggesting role of both holistic and featural processing in SFA.…”

Neural correlates of affective contributions to lexical decisions in children and adults

“…Similarly to adults, children recruited regions like lIFG including insula and ACC associated with affective information—at least for positive words. On the behavioural level, Kazanas and Altarriba 50 as well as Yin,Yuan and Zhang 51 reported a processing advantage of positive stimuli in different modalities and settings in adults, termed the positivity superiority effect 37 . Our behavioural data support this effect, i.e.…”