Facial gestures have been given an increasingly critical role in models of emotion. The biological significance of interindividual transmission of emotional signals is a pivotal assumption for placing the face in a central position in these models. This assumption invited a logical corollary, examined in this article: Face-processing should be highly efficient. Three experiments documented an asymmetry in the processing of emotionally discrepant faces embedded in crowds. The results suggested that threatening faces pop out of crowds, perhaps as a result of a preattentive, parallel search for signals of direct threat.

We asked subjects to recall memories of events that evoked feelings of anger, sadness, fear, and embarrassment. These memories evoked patterns of dominant and nondominant emotions. The dominant emotions evoked by the recalled events were no less intense for repressors than nonrepressors, but repressors' patterns of nondominant emotions were less intense than those of nonrepressors. The data suggested that for repressors the associative network of negative emotional memories may be more discrete and less complex than that for nonrepressors. This finding was consistent with recent research indicating that negative emotional memories are less accessible for repressors than for nonrepressors. The pattern of multivariate effects suggests that this repressive memorial architecture may serve the motive of isolating fear-associated memories.

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1988) found that an angry face in a crowd of happy faces can be found faster than a happy face in a crowd of angry faces. They called this finding the face-inthe-crowd effect (FICE). The present experiments replicated this effect for nine-face crowds but not for four -face crowds. Hansen and Hansen concluded that their result was due to "pop out," because they found no reliable effect of crowd size for angry face targets. Contrary to prediction from the "pop out" hypothesis, we found that the position of the target face within the crowd had an effect on reaction time. Such positional effects demonstrate that subjects were scanning the face array to locate the target face . Examination of the literature on the perception of facial expression suggests that the FICE may be produced, at least in part, by the crowds scanned rather than by the target scanned for. The present paper suggests that conclusive evidence of "pop-out" should consist of both the absence oftarget-position effects and the conventionally accepted smallstimulus-set-size effects.C . H. Hansen and R. D. report that the search time to locate a face within an array of other faces depends on the expression of the target face. An angry face in an array of happy faces was found faster than a happy face in an array of angry faces. They call their finding the face-in-the-erowd effect (FICE). In order to argue that "pop-out " is actually occurring, there must be little or no relationship between the number of items in the display and the time taken to find a target embedded in that display (Treisman & Souther, 1985) . This is essentially what C. H. report. They suggest that faces are preattentively searched in parallel for features associated with a threatening expression, so that "an angry face in a happy crowd would pop out and not require an extensive, time-consuming, serial attentive search to discover its presence. . . . [On the other hand,] a happy face in an angry crowd would not be preattentively distinctive [because it is the only face whose expression does not represent a threatening emotion]; it would not pop out and discovering its presence would require a serial search of the faces " (p. 920).There is another requirement that the data must meet if conclusive evidence for "pop out" is to be found . If "pop out " occurs, reaction time to locate the angry face should not be influenced by the position of the target face Experiment 1 was conducted by Carol Hampton, as an honors independent study project, and Experiment 2 was conducted by Louis Bersine, as an independent study project. These projects were supervised by Dean G. Purcell . We wish to thank Eric Hiris for helping with data collection and analysis, and Alan L. Stewart for a critical review of the manuscript.