Skip to main content

Sad people are more accurate at expression identification with a smaller own-ethnicity bias than happy people.

Hills, P.J. and Hill, D.M., 2018. Sad people are more accurate at expression identification with a smaller own-ethnicity bias than happy people. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71 (8), 1797 -1806.

Full text available as:

[img]
Preview
PDF
Sadpeoplearebetteratexpressionrecognition_June2017_accepted.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives.

452kB

DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2017.1350869

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.

Item Type:Article
ISSN:1747-0218
Uncontrolled Keywords:Mood induction; depression; eye tracking; face recognition; happiness; own-ethnicity bias; sadness
Group:Faculty of Science & Technology
ID Code:29493
Deposited By: Symplectic RT2
Deposited On:24 Jul 2017 10:51
Last Modified:14 Mar 2022 14:05

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

More statistics for this item...
Repository Staff Only -