You look pretty happy: Attractiveness moderates emotion perception.

Abstract

A happy face advantage has consistently been shown in emotion categorization tasks; happy faces are categorized as happy faster than angry faces as angry. Furthermore, social category cues, such as facial sex and race, moderate the happy face advantage in evaluatively congruent ways with a larger happy face advantage for more positively evaluated faces. We investigated whether attractiveness, a facial attribute unrelated to more defined social categories, would moderate the happy face advantage consistent with the evaluative congruence account. A larger happy face advantage for the more positively evaluated attractive faces than for unattractive faces was predicted. Across 4 experiments participants categorized attractive and unattractive faces as happy or angry as quickly and accurately as possible. As predicted, when female faces were categorized separately, a happy face advantage emerged for the attractive females but not for the unattractive females. Corresponding results were only found in the error rates for male faces. This pattern was confirmed when female and male faces were categorized together, indicating that attractiveness may have a stronger influence on emotion perception for female faces. Attractiveness is shown to moderate emotion perception in line with the evaluative congruence account and is suggested to have a stronger influence on emotion perception than facial sex cues in contexts where attractiveness is a salient evaluative dimension.

Emotion-based Stereotypes in Image Analysis Services

“…The most interesting findings concern the stereotype of black men and women as being more angry or hostile, as compared to whites of the same gender. As discussed in related work [19], the faces of non-white individuals tend to be categorized easier as being angry when they show an angry emotion compared to whites. We confirmed empirically that some EAS (in particular, Amazon and Microsoft) were more likely to correctly infer an angry expression on a black man versus a white man.…”

“…In contrast, in the same study, Korean participants perceived neutral Caucasian faces as being negative. In another study, Hugenberg et al provided evidence of a prevalent cultural stereotype that African Americans are aggressive [15,19]. They extended this research by hypothesizing that the racial prejudice is strongly associated with hostile emotions and demonstrated that there is a tendency to categorize the emotionally ambiguous faces of African Americans under emotions of hostility (e.g., anger) [16].…”

“…Gender influences on the Perception of Emotion. Lindeberg et al investigated whether gender and attractiveness moderate emotion perception [19]. They found that happy faces are categorized as "happy" faster than angry faces are recognized as "angry," a phenomenon known as "the happy face advantage".…”

Light Makeup Decreases Receivers’ Negative Emotional Experience

“…Facial attractiveness not only affects social interactions but also modulates emotional perception and may directly impact emotional experience 22,23 . Nevertheless, there is insufficient evidence to expound on the relationship between makeup and emotional contagion.…”

“…Third, we hypothesize the effect of makeup on emotions may be unbalanced. Evidence from related studies has indicated an asymmetrical mutual influence of different emotional expressions and facial attractiveness 22,31,32 , which suggests that wearing makeup may only affect positive or negative emotional contagion. Moreover, for neutral expressions,…”