Threat advantage: Perception of angry and happy dynamic faces across cultures

Marinetti, Claudia; Mesquita, Batja; Yik, Michelle; Cragwall, Caroline; Gallagher, Ashleigh H.

doi:10.1080/02699931.2011.644976

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Facial expressions of happiness and anger are known to have different hedonic impact [44,45]. A 2D morphing procedure like the one we used generates an image resulting from the linear interpolation of image features.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body Actions Change the Appearance of Facial Expressions

Fantoni

Gerbino

2014

PLoS ONE

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Perception, cognition, and emotion do not operate along segregated pathways; rather, their adaptive interaction is supported by various sources of evidence. For instance, the aesthetic appraisal of powerful mood inducers like music can bias the facial expression of emotions towards mood congruency. In four experiments we showed similar mood-congruency effects elicited by the comfort/discomfort of body actions. Using a novel Motor Action Mood Induction Procedure, we let participants perform comfortable/uncomfortable visually-guided reaches and tested them in a facial emotion identification task. Through the alleged mediation of motor action induced mood, action comfort enhanced the quality of the participant’s global experience (a neutral face appeared happy and a slightly angry face neutral), while action discomfort made a neutral face appear angry and a slightly happy face neutral. Furthermore, uncomfortable (but not comfortable) reaching improved the sensitivity for the identification of emotional faces and reduced the identification time of facial expressions, as a possible effect of hyper-arousal from an unpleasant bodily experience.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body Actions Change the Appearance of Facial Expressions

Fantoni

Gerbino

2014

PLoS ONE

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“…However, even under such gross approximations, the dynamic displays provided a greater degree of realism than the static displays, with strong behavioural consequences (see Figures 4,5,7,8,and 9). In fact, this method for generating dynamic emotional expressions has been successfully used in many previous behavioural studies (e.g., Becker et al, 2012;Joormann & Gotlib, 2006;Kamachi et al, 2001;Lynch et al, 2006;Marinetti, Mesquita, Yik, Cragwall, & Gallagher, 2012;Oosterhof & Todorov, 2009;Yoshikawa & Sato, 2008) and it has been shown to elicit an enhanced neural response with respect to static emotional facial expressions (Sato, Fujimura, & Suzuki, 2008;see also LaBar et al, 2003). Interestingly, Ambadar, Schooler, and Cohn (2005) measured the accuracy of emotion recognition from videorecordings that preserved the dynamic characteristics of natural facial expressions of basic emotions (''dynamic'' condition) and from frame sequences in which only the first and last frame of the original video sequences were presented (''first-last'' condition).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anger superiority effect: The importance of dynamic emotional facial expressions

Ceccarini

Caudek

2013

Visual Cognition

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A rapid response to a threatening face in a crowd is important to successfully interact in social environments. Visual search tasks have been employed to determine whether there is a processing advantage for detecting an angry face in a crowd, compared to a happy face. The empirical findings supporting the ''anger superiority effect'' (ASE), however, have been criticized on the basis of possible lowlevel visual confounds and because of the limited ecological validity of the stimuli. Moreover, a ''happiness superiority effect'' is usually found with more realistic stimuli. In the present study, we tested the ASE by using dynamic (and static) images of realistic human faces, with validated emotional expressions having similar intensities, after controlling the bottom-up visual saliency and the amount of image motion. In five experiments, we found strong evidence for an ASE when using dynamic displays of facial expressions, but not when the emotions were expressed by static face images.Keywords: Anger superiority effect; Dynamic faces; Face-in-the-crowd effect; Face perception; Emotion.Evolutionary arguments may lead us to expect that threatening faces are detected more efficiently among a crowd of distractor faces than nonthreatening faces. Because facial threat provides a particularly potent social Please address all correspondence to Corrado Caudek, Department of Neuroscience, Psychology, Pharmacology, and Child's Health (NEUROFARBA), University of Florence, Via di San Salvi 12, Complesso di San Salvi, Padiglione 26, 50135 Firenze, Italy. E-mail: corrado.caudek@unifi.it These findings suggest that the ASE might be mediated by mechanisms that are summoned only in part (or not at all) by stimuli lacking the typical dynamic characteristics of facial emotion in natural settings.

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“…The ability to quickly identify and respond to danger in the environment conveys substantial survival advantage, and threat-related stimuli therefore has a processing advantage (Calvo and Castillo, 2005; Vuilleumier and Schwartz, 2001). This includes threat-related facial expressions (Feldmann-Wustefeld et al, 2011; Holmes et al, 2009; Marinetti et al, 2012), even when presented at low levels of awareness (Mogg and Bradley, 1999). However, this bias may lead to socially undesirable behaviour if dysregulated.…”

Section: Emotional Facial Processing and Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of acute alcohol consumption and processing of emotion in faces: Implications for understanding alcohol-related aggression

Attwood

Munafò

2014

J Psychopharmacol

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The negative consequences of chronic alcohol abuse are well known, but heavy episodic consumption ("binge drinking") is also associated with significant personal and societal harms. Aggressive tendencies are increased after alcohol but the mechanisms underlying these changes are not fully understood. While effects on behavioural control are likely to be important, other effects may be involved given the widespread action of alcohol. Altered processing of social signals is associated with changes in social behaviours, including aggression, but until recently there has been little research investigating the effects of acute alcohol consumption on these outcomes. Recent work investigating the effects of acute alcohol on emotional face processing has suggested reduced sensitivity to submissive signals (sad faces) and increased perceptual bias towards provocative signals (angry faces) after alcohol consumption, which may play a role in alcohol-related aggression. Here we discuss a putative mechanism that may explain how alcohol consumption influences emotional processing and subsequent aggressive responding, via disruption of orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)-amygdala connectivity. While the importance of emotional processing on social behaviours is well established, research into acute alcohol consumption and emotional processing is still in its infancy. Further research is needed and we outline a research agenda to address gaps in the literature.

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Threat advantage: Perception of angry and happy dynamic faces across cultures

Cited by 8 publications

References 18 publications

Body Actions Change the Appearance of Facial Expressions

Body Actions Change the Appearance of Facial Expressions

Anger superiority effect: The importance of dynamic emotional facial expressions

Effects of acute alcohol consumption and processing of emotion in faces: Implications for understanding alcohol-related aggression

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