The influence of emotion on face processing

Abstract

According to the broaden-and-build theory, positive emotions broaden one's thought-action repertoire, which may manifest as a widened attentional scope in cognitive processing. The present study directly tests this hypothesis by examining the influences of induced emotions (positive, neutral and negative) on holistic processing of face (Experiment 1) and face discrimination (Experiment 2). In both experiments, emotions induced with images from the International Affective Picture System significantly interacted with face processing. That is, positive emotions engendered greater holistic face encoding in a composite-face task in Experiment 1 and more accurate face discrimination in Experiment 2, relative to the neutral condition. In contrast, negative emotions impaired holistic face encoding in the composite-face task and reduced face discrimination accuracy. Taken together, these results provide further support for the attentional broadening effect of positive affect by demonstrating that induced positive emotions facilitate holistic/configural processing.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Face recognition
• Holistic
• Composite-face effect
• Broaden-and-build

Acknowledgements

This work was made possible by a start-up grant from University of California, Riverside to Weiwei Zhang.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.