Culture shapes preschoolers’ emotion recognition but not emotion comprehension: a cross-cultural study in Germany and Singapore

Contemporary approaches suggest that emotions are shaped by culture. Children growing up in different cultures experience culture-specific emotion socialization practices. As a result, children growing up in Western societies (e.g., US or UK) rely on explicit, semantic information, whereas children from East Asian cultures (e.g., China or Japan) are more sensitive towards implicit, contextual cues when confronted with others’ emotions. The aim of the present study was to investigate two aspects of preschoolers’ emotion understanding (emotion recognition and emotion comprehension) in a cross-cultural setting. To this end, Singaporean and German preschoolers were tested with an emotion recognition task employing European-American and East Asian child’s faces and the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC; Pons et al., 2004). In total, 129 German and Singaporean preschoolers (mean age 5.34 years) participated. Results indicate that preschoolers were able to recognize emotions of child’s faces above chance level. In line with previous findings, Singaporean preschoolers were more accurate in recognizing emotions from facial stimuli compared to German preschoolers. Accordingly, Singaporean preschoolers outperformed German preschoolers in the Recognition component of the TEC. The overall performance in TEC did not differ between the two samples. Findings of this study provide further evidence that emotion understanding is culturally shaped in accordance with culture-specific emotion socialization practices.

Long-Term Influence of Incidental Emotions on the Emotional Judgment of Neutral Faces

Background: Evidence indicates that the processing of facial stimuli may be influenced by incidental factors, and these influences are particularly powerful when facial expressions are ambiguous, such as neutral faces. However, limited research investigated whether emotional contextual information presented in a preceding and unrelated experiment could be pervasively carried over to another experiment to modulate neutral face processing.Objective: The present study aims to investigate whether an emotional text presented in a first experiment could generate negative emotion toward neutral faces in a second experiment unrelated to the previous experiment.Methods: Ninety-nine students (all women) were randomly assigned to read and evaluate a negative text (negative context) or a neutral text (neutral text) in the first experiment. In the subsequent second experiment, the participants performed the following two tasks: (1) an attentional task in which neutral faces were presented as distractors and (2) a task involving the emotional judgment of neutral faces.Results: The results show that compared to the neutral context, in the negative context, the participants rated more faces as negative. No significant result was found in the attentional task.Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that incidental emotional information available in a previous experiment can increase participants’ propensity to interpret neutral faces as more negative when emotional information is directly evaluated. Therefore, the present study adds important evidence to the literature suggesting that our behavior and actions are modulated by previous information in an incidental or low perceived way similar to what occurs in everyday life, thereby modulating our judgments and emotions.

Hong Kong Women Project a Larger Body When Speaking to Attractive Men

In this pilot study we investigated the vocal strategies of Cantonese women when addressing an attractive vs. unattractive male. We recruited 19 young female native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese who completed an attractiveness rating task, followed by a speech production task where they were presented a subset of the same faces. By comparing the rating results and corresponding acoustic data of the facial stimuli, we found that when young Cantonese women spoke to an attractive male, they were less breathy, lower in fundamental frequency, and with denser formants, all of which are considered to project a larger body. Participants who were more satisfied with their own height used these vocal strategies more actively. These results are discussed in terms of the body size projection principle.

Not Just About Faces in Context: Face–Context Relation Moderates the Impact of Contextual Threat on Facial Trustworthiness

Recent work showed that the attribution of facial trustworthiness can be influenced by the surrounding context in which a face is embedded: contexts that convey threat make faces less trustworthy. In four studies ( N = 388, three preregistered) we tested whether face–context integration is influenced by how faces and contexts are encoded relationally. In Experiments 1a to 1c, face–context integration was stronger when threatening stimuli were attributable to the human action. Faces were judged less trustworthy when shown in threatening contexts that were ascribable (vs. non-ascribable) to the human action. In Experiment 2, we manipulated face–context relations using instructions. When instructions presented facial stimuli as belonging to the “perpetrators” of the threatening contexts, no difference with the control (no-instructions) condition was found in face–context integration. Instead, the effect was reduced when faces were presented as “victims.” We discussed the importance of considering relational reasoning when studying face–context integration.

Correlational and Experimental Effects of Online Apparel Shopping Behavior on Gaze Behavior, Appearance Attitudes, and Self-Worth in Women

Online apparel shopping is popular among women, with possible negative body image consequences, particularly when the website imagery is body-focused. We investigated both correlational and experimental effects of online apparel shopping on women’s (N = 113) explicitly and implicitly measured self-worth, appearance attitudes, and body gaze behavior. Correlational results showed that online apparel shopping correlates negatively with self-esteem, and positively with appearance attitudes and self-objectification. During a simulated online shopping activity, women who were exposed to a body-focused activewear website felt worse than usual about their looks, when compared to women who were exposed to a non-body focused casualwear website. Unexpectedly, exposure to the activewear website primed lower body gaze towards subsequent images of partially and fully clothed women. Furthermore, gaze behavior did not significantly correlate with any of the other measures. Given that women have a natural tendency to gaze at faces, the deprivation of facial stimuli in the activewear condition presumably led to a compensatory gaze effect, whereby subsequent attention toward bodies was comparably low, possibly as a protective mechanism. These results suggest potential implications of short- and long-term exposure to online apparel imagery, as well as highlighting the complexity of interpreting female gaze behavior.

Methodological issues when using face prototypes: A case study on the Faceaurus dataset

Prototype faces, created by averaging faces from several individuals sharing a common characteristic (for example a certain personality trait), can be used for highly informative experimental designs in face research. Although the facial prototype method is both ingenious and useful, in this paper we argue that its implementation is associated with two major issues: pseudoreplication and lack of external validity, both aggravated by a lack of transparency regarding the methods used and their limitations. Here, we describe these limitations and illustrate our claims with a systematic review of studies creating facial stimuli using the prototypes dataset “Faceaurus”(Holtzman, 2011). We then propose some solutions that can eliminate or reduce these problems and consequently improve on how the facial prototype method is being used. We provide recommendations for future research employing this method on how to produce more generalisable and replicable results.

Effects of color–emotion association on facial expression judgments

Color and emotion are metaphorically associated in the human mind. This color–emotion association affects perceptual judgment. For example, stimuli representing colors can affect judgment of facial expressions. The present study examined whether colors associated with happiness (e.g., yellow) and sadness (e.g., blue and gray) facilitate judgments of the associated emotions in facial expressions. We also examined whether temporal proximity between color and facial stimuli interacts with any of these effects. Participants were presented with pictures of a happy or sad face against a yellow-, blue-, or gray-colored background and asked to judge whether the face represented happiness or sadness as quickly as possible. The face stimulus was presented simultaneously (Experiment 1) or preceded for one second by the colored background (Experiment 2). The analysis of response time showed that yellow facilitated happiness judgment, while neither blue nor gray facilitated sadness judgment. Moreover, the effect was found only when the face and color stimuli were presented simultaneously. The results imply that the association of sadness with blue and gray is weak and, consequently, does not affect emotional judgment. Our results also suggest that temporal proximity is critical for the effect of the color–emotion association (e.g., yellow–happiness) on emotional judgment.

Saccadic eye movements are deployed faster for salient facial stimuli, but are relatively indifferent to their emotional content

The present study explores the threat bias for fearful facial expressions using saccadic latency as the response mode, with a particular focus on the role of low-level facial information, including spatial frequency, physical contrast, and apparent, perceived contrast. In a simple localisation task, participants were presented with spatially-filtered versions of neutral, fearful, angry and happy faces. Faces were either composed of naturally-occurring, expression-related differences in contrast, normalised for RMS contrast, or normalised for their apparent, perceived contrast. Together, findings show that saccadic responses are not biased toward fearful expressions compared to neutral, angry or happy counterparts, regardless of their spatial frequency content. Saccadic response times are, however, significantly influenced by the physical contrast of facial stimuli, and the extent to which these are preserved or normalised at the physical (RMS matched) and psychophysical (perceptually matched) level. We discuss the implications of findings for the threat bias literature, and the extent to which image processing can be expected to influence behavioural responses to socially-relevant facial stimuli.

Trustworthiness appraisals of faces wearing a surgical mask during the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany: An experimental study

Background During the Covid-19 pandemic, the negative effects of wearing a mouth-nose cover (MNC) on interpersonal functioning have been discussed in public media but empirical studies on how wearing MNCs affect social judgements are sparse. In the present study, we investigated the effects of MNCs on trustworthiness appraisals, the influence of changes due to MNCs in evaluating joy, and the relationship between a social-cognitive appraisal bias and a participant’s characteristics. Methods All participants (N = 165) judged the intensity of happiness and trustworthiness in calm facial stimuli presented with and without a surgical mask covering part of the face. We analysed the relationship of changes in judgements evoked by MNCs to participants’ evaluations of MNCs as protective tools and explored their associations with the burden experienced by wearing MNCs, compliance to behaviour recommendations, their risk associated with the pandemic, and their levels of psychological distress. Results Overall, calm facial stimuli covered with MNCs were evaluated as less trustworthy and, to an even stronger extent, less happy than uncovered facial stimuli. However, participants varied in whether they showed a negative or positive evaluation of faces with MNCs; the negative bias was stronger in those participants who attributed lower protective potential to MNCs, experienced a higher burden while wearing MNCs, wore MNCs less often, and experienced a higher level of psychological distress. Conclusions A negative bias in trustworthiness appraisals of faces with a positive emotional expression covered by MNCs is linked to a participant’s evaluation of MNCs as inefficient and burdening and their experience of high psychological distress.