Sad people are more accurate at expression identification with a smaller own-ethnicity bias than happy people.
Authors: Hills, P.J. and Hill, D.M.
Journal: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Volume: 71
Issue: 8
Pages: 1797-1806
ISSN: 1747-0218
Abstract:Sad individuals perform more accurately at face identity recognition (Hills, Werno, & Lewis, 2011), possibly because they scan more of the face during encoding. During expression identification tasks, sad individuals do not fixate on the eyes as much as happier individuals (Wu, Pu, Allen, & Pauli, 2012). Fixating on features other than the eyes leads to a reduced own-ethnicity bias (Hills & Lewis, 2006). This background indicates that sad individuals would not view the eyes as much as happy individuals and this would result in improved expression recognition and a reduced own-ethnicity bias. This prediction was tested using an expression identification task, with eye tracking. We demonstrate that sad-induced participants show enhanced expression recognition and a reduced own-ethnicity bias than happy-induced participants due to scanning more facial features. We conclude that mood affects eye movements and face encoding by causing a wider sampling strategy and deeper encoding of facial features diagnostic for expression identification.
https://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/29493/
Source: BURO EPrints