Emotional faces influence numerosity estimation without awareness

Abstract

It is well established that emotional information influences perceived duration. On the basis of this together with the proposition of common magnitude estimation system, we hypothesized that the presentation of emotional faces can modulate the estimation of numerical quantity as well. The present study examined this hypothesis by investigating the effects of unconsciously presented emotional faces on numerosity estimation using number bisection task. We rendered the facial images invisible by continuous flash suppression methodology in order to measure the genuine effect of emotional information by reducing the influences of a conscious effort of emotional regulation. The results have shown that the unconscious presentation of fearful faces leads to underestimation of numerosity compared to happy and neutral faces. Further experiment has shown that the participants could not detect the presence of facial expressions directly. Together, these results indicate that perceived emotion influences numerosity judgments automatically without conscious awareness, which provides novel evidence linking emotion and quantity perception.

Continuous flash suppression: Known and unknowns

“…Yang et al 2010 Faivre et al, 2012, Experiment 5b) and faces with a congruent emotion to the prime (Ye, He, Hu, Yu, & Wang, 2014). An invisible emotional face also has the ability to influence numerosity estimation (Doi & Shinohara, 2016) and induce reliable skin conductance response (only when the face is fearful; Lapate et al, 2014; see Table 4 for a summary of the experimental configuration and the assessment of awareness in the priming and adaptation aftereffect studies that evaluated nonconscious facial expression recognition with CFS). *In this study, the authors performed awareness task in a separate trial than the main trials but in the same block.…”

Number, time, and space are not singularly represented: Evidence against a common magnitude system beyond early childhood

“…For example, an extant literature reveals that emotional content affects our ability to process time (for reviews, see Droit-Volet, Fayolle, Lamotte, & Gil, 2013;Droit-Volet & Meck, 2007), such that children and adults overestimate time in the presence of angry faces, in particular, relative to neutral or happy ones (Doi & Shinohara, 2009;Droit-Volet, Brunot, & Niedenthal, 2004;Gil & Droit-Volet, 2012;Gil, Niedenthal, & Droit-Volet, 2007;Tipples, 2008;Young & Cordes, 2013; see also Bar-Haim, Kerem, Lamy, & Zakay, 2010;Tipples, 2011). More recently, however, work has revealed that the same emotional faces result in the underestimation of number (Baker et al, 2013;Doi & Shinohara, 2016;Hamamouche, Hurst, & Cordes, 2016;Lewis et al, 2017;Young & Cordes, 2013; see also Ashkenazi, 2018;Hamamouche, Niemi, & Cordes, 2017). That is, children and adults underestimate number in the context of happy and angry faces relative to neutral ones, whereas they overestimate time in the context of angry faces.…”

Person Perception, Meet People Perception: Exploring the Social Vision of Groups

“…When people reflect on the gender diversity of a group, their impression is shaped not only by gender composition but also by the racial diversity of the group (Daniels et al, 2017; see also Crawford et al, 2019). Likewise, ensemble representations of group emotion can affect impressions of the actual size of the group (Doi & Shinohara, 2016). In addition, as reviewed above, research has also identified spillover effects moving from the group to impressions of the individual-and vice versa-and impressions of group emotion affect impressions of individual emotions (Corbin & Crawford, 2018;Griffiths et al, 2018; see also Chang et al, 2020).…”