Does facial redness really affect emotion perception? Evidence for limited generalisability of effects of facial redness on emotion perception in a large sample

ABSTRACT

We conducted a preregistered study (N = 609) to conceptually replicate and extend prior research regarding the effects of facial redness on emotion perception. In a within-subjects design, participants saw emotion faces (anger, happiness, fear, neutral) of a random female and a random male target with default facial colouration and increased facial redness and were asked to simultaneously rate the intensity of six emotions (happiness, surprise, sadness, fear, disgust, anger) for each emotion face. The emotion intensity was rated higher, when the emotion face and the rated emotion matched than when the emotion face and the rated emotion did not match. However, increased facial redness did not influence the intensity of the rated emotion. The results of this conceptual replication limit the generalisability of previous findings, challenge the assumption that facial redness is used as a cue to infer emotions, and point to the necessity to develop a more nuanced theoretical account of contextual boundaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Facial redness
• emotion inference
• emotion perception
• emotion recognition

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for extremely valuable comments that helped us improve the paper. We thank Falk Vambrie for language editing.

Compliance with ethical standards

All procedures performed in all studies were conducted by following the ethical standards defined in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards as well as the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee. Informed consent was obtained from all participants involved in the study. This article does not contain any studies involving animals performed by any of the authors.

CRediT Author statement

Daniel Wolf: Conceptualisation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Project administration, Visualisation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Johannes Leder: Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Visualisation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Lukas Röseler: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing. Astrid Schütz: Resources, Supervision, Writing – review & editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.