Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Even though people usually agreed that “a book should not be judged by its cover”, researches had repeatedly demonstrated that individuals spontaneously and very swiftly formed impression on others based merely on the appearance of their faces. Facial attractiveness is an important content in the first perception. Which had been linked to outcomes as diverse as mate choice, job hunting, and cooperation. Given these real world consequences of the first impressions, it is important to understand how these impressions are formed. Some studies found that facial physical characteristics, such as symmetry, averageness and sexual dimorphism, had a great impact on facial attractiveness. While different individuals have different experience, when faced with the same face in the same context, different individuals have different evaluations on facial attractiveness. Some researchers put forward a new theory, namely, the observer hypothesis, which demonstrated that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. However, the processing of unfamiliar facial attractiveness remained unclear. The goal of the current study was to explore how we processed the impression of unfamiliar facial attractiveness. 19 males and 27 females took part in the experiment one and 16 males and 22 females participated in the experiment two, each experiment contained two phases that were learning tasks and evaluation tasks. In the learning phase, participants firstly learned to associate faces with negative, neutral, or positive trait words or imaged the behavior of the individuals to form different impression, which was contribute to the same valence between the neutral face and trait words or sentence. When participants could evaluate the valence of the face correctly, they could proceed to the next phase. In the experiment one, 13 males and 25 females had passed learning phase and evaluated the original faces and the unfamiliar faces. In the experiment two, 12 males and 17 females had done the learning task and evaluation task successfully. And in the evaluation phase, extend of warmth, competence and facial attractiveness of the unfamiliar faces, which had 50% similarity with the learned faces, were evaluated. Both of the two experiments had the same results, which showed that there are two ways to form unfamiliar facial attractiveness: (1) the first one is that generalization effect occurred after halo effect, compared with negative familiar faces, positive familiar faces were evaluated more attractive, so did the unfamiliar faces that were familiar with positive familiar faces; (2) the second one is that halo effect occurred after generalization effect, unfamiliar faces which were similar with positive familiar faces were not only evaluated more positive but also more attractive. The results suggested that generalization effect occurred after halo effect and halo effect occurred after generalization effect were the two ways to form unfamiliar facial attractiveness. In conclusion, halo effect and generalization effect play an important role in the processing of unfamiliar facial attractiveness.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Facial expressions are fundamental emotional stimuli. They convey important information in social interaction. Most previous studies focused on the processing of isolated facial expressions. However, in everyday life, faces always appear within complex scenes. The emotional meaning of the scenes plays an important role in judging facial expressions. Additionally, facial expressions change constantly from appearance to disappearance. Visual scenes may have different effects on the processing of faces with different emotional intensities. Individual personality traits, such as trait anxiety, also affect the processing of facial expressions. For example, individuals with high trait anxiety have processing bias on negative emotional faces. The present study explored whether previously presented visual scenes affected the identification of emotions in morphed facial expressions, and whether the influences of visual scenes on the identification of facial expressions showed differences between individuals with high and low trait anxiety. Using the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), we placed 29 participants who scored in the top 27% in the high trait anxiety group (9 men and 20 women; mean age 19.76 � 1.3 years) and 28 participants who scored in the bottom 27% in the low trait anxiety group (11 males and 17 females, mean age 19.71 � 1.2 years). The images of faces (4 models, half male and half female) used in this study were selected from the NimStim Set of Facial Expressions. The face stimuli showed typical happy, neutral, and fearful expressions. Facial expressions were morphed to create a series of gradually varied images of facial expressions. Specifically, fearful face (100%) versus neutral face (0%) and happy face (100%) versus neutral face (0%) were morphed in 20% increments. In addition, 40 surrounding scene images were used, with 20 positive scenes and 20 negative scenes. In the face-emotion detection task, participants were asked to determine whether the emotion from the faces presented after the scenes were fearful, happy, or neutral. For the repeated measure ANOVA of the accuracy for facial expression detection, the results showed scene effects on the identification of emotions in facial expressions. The scene effects were varied between the different intensity of face emotion: for the emotionally vague faces, the detection of happy and fearful expression showed significant scene effects; for the faces with moderate emotional intensity, only the detection of the fearful faces showed significant scene effects; for the intense emotions on faces, there was a significant effect on happy and neutral faces but not on fearful faces. Trait anxiety as an individual factor was found to play a moderating role in the identification of facial expressions. For the high trait anxiety group, there were no significant differences in the accuracy of emotional detection between congruent and incongruent conditions. This means that the high trait anxiety group did not show significant scene effects. The low trait anxiety group showed a significant difference in the accuracy of identification of emotions in facial expressions between congruent and incongruent conditions, i.e., significant scene effects.In summary, the present study demonstrated that, for facial expressions with low emotional intensity, the identification of happy and fearful faces was more likely to be affected by visual scenes than the identification of neutral faces. Visual scenes were more likely to affect the identification of moderately fearful faces than moderately happy faces. Trait anxiety played a moderating role in the influence of visual scenes on emotional detection of facial expressions. Specifically, individuals with high trait anxiety were less affected by surrounding visual scenes and paid more attention to facial expressions.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2021-09-07
Abstract： Facial expressions are an important medium for understanding the emotional feelings of others. However, individual factors such as gender, age, and personality traits can influence the perception of facial expressions. For instance, individuals with elevated level of trait anxiety, which is measure of frequency and intensity of occurrence of anxiety related symptoms, show attentional bias towards emotional stimuli, that is, higher attention to emotional information such as facial expressions. These studies mostly focused on attentional processing stage, and it remains unclear whether trait anxiety affects the pre-attentive processing stage of facial expression perception. Pre-attentive processing is an automatic evaluation of whether attention is needed for the stimulus, thereby filtering out irrelevant information to conserve cognitive resources and improve the efficiency of information processing. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the pre-attentive processing of facial expressions and the bias to emotional stimuli of trait anxious individuals to emotional stimuli during the pre-attentive processing stage. According to the scores of Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety inventory (STAI), 20 participants who scored in the top 27% were assigned to the high trait anxiety group (13 women; mean age=19.02 ± 0.63 years) and 20 participants who scored in the bottom 27% were assigned to the low trait anxiety group (11 women; mean age=19.63 ± 0.88 years). The stimuli used in the experiment were happy, sad and neutral face pictures selected from the Chinese Facial Affective Picture System (CAFPS; Gong et al., 2011) including 10 pictures (5 females and 5 males) of each kind of emotion. The deviant-standard-reverse oddball paradigm included 4 types of facial expression sequences: neutral standard stimuli/happy deviant stimuli, happy standard stimuli/neutral deviant stimuli; neutral standard stimuli/sad deviant stimuli, and sad standard stimuli/neutral deviant stimuli. The standard stimuli mean that this type of stimuli were appeared about 80% of the time in the sequence, and the deviant stimuli were about 20%. Participants were instructed to detect unpredictable changes in the size of fixation cross in the center of visual field and press a corresponding button as fast and as accurate as possible, and ignored facial expressions. The results revealed that, the amplitudes of N170 elicited by deviant faces were significantly larger than standard faces. Importantly, in the early EMMN, the mean amplitude elicited by sad facial expressions was significantly larger than happy facial expressions in low trait anxiety group, but there was no significant difference between happy and sad facial expressions in high trait anxiety group. Moreover, the early EMMN amplitude of happy faces was significantly larger in the high trait anxiety group than in the low trait anxiety group. These results suggest that the high trait anxiety group has similar amplification of EMMN amplitude for both happy and sad expressions. Our results show that there is a difference between high and low trait anxiety in the pre-attentive processing of facial expression. This suggests that personality traits are important factors influencing the pre-attentive processing of facial expressions, and high trait anxiety individuals may have difficulty in effectively distinguishing between happy and sad emotional faces during the pre-attentive processing stage and have similar processing patterns for them.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2018-09-07 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： 分别从特质依恋和状态依恋角度考察施助者的依恋安全在求助者面孔可信度与助人行为之间的调节作用。结果发现：(1)求助者面孔可信度影响助人行为, 面孔可信度高的求助者得到的助人行为显著多于面孔可信度低的求助者; (2)施助者的依恋安全调节求助者面孔可信度与助人行为之间的关系, 安全依恋能有效缓冲低面孔可信度带来助人行为下降的趋势。本研究结果表明依恋安全有助于提升社会安全感和促进亲社会行为, 因此应注重依恋安全的培养。
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2018-09-07 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： 基于自我加工优势和内隐积极联想理论, 采用视觉搜索范式结合ERPs技术考察个体自我表情加工的特点, 并进一步探讨情绪效价和身份信息对面孔加工的直接影响。结果发现：(1)搜索自我快乐表情比自我愤怒表情及两类他人表情速度更快、正确率也更高; (2)自我快乐表情对N1、N2、LPP成分的激活显著大于自我愤怒表情及两类他人表情。自我表情加工存在积极加工偏向, 且这种加工优势在面孔加工早期视觉编码阶段就已出现。
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