Recognition advantage of happy faces in extrafoveal vision: Featural and affective processing

Abstract

Happy, surprised, disgusted, angry, sad, fearful, and neutral facial expressions were presented extrafoveally (2.5° away from fixation) for 150 ms, followed by a probe word for recognition (Experiment 1) or a probe scene for affective valence evaluation (Experiment 2). Eye movements were recorded and gaze-contingent masking prevented foveal viewing of the faces. Results showed that (a) happy expressions were recognized faster than others in the absence of fixations on the faces, (b) the same pattern emerged when the faces were presented upright or upside-down, (c) happy prime faces facilitated the affective evaluation of emotionally congruent probe scenes, and (d) such priming effects occurred at 750 but not at 250 ms prime–probe stimulus–onset asynchrony. This reveals an advantage in the recognition of happy faces outside of overt visual attention, and suggests that this recognition advantage relies initially on featural processing and involves processing of positive affect at a later stage.

Keywords:

• Affective priming
• Attention
• Emotion
• Facial expression
• Recognition

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Grant No. PSI2009-07245 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation to MGC, and by the Academy of Finland Grant No. 12103 to LN, and the Aivo Aalto grant from the Aalto University.

Notes

¹As an alternative interpretation of the happy face recognition advantage, a reviewer suggested that such an advantage might not be due to face recognition per se, but to the relative ease or difficulty in matching the face and the word. Essentially, because there is one category of positively valenced words and faces (happy), whereas there are several subcategories of negatively valenced faces and words (angry, sad, etc.), the process of matching word and face might be easier for the positive than for the negative faces. Against this hypothesis, (a) the general agreement in using each of the six words for each of the six basic expressions in daily life, (b) the familiarization with examples of faces and words shown to the participants during the instructions prior the experiment, as well as the practice trials, and (c) the repeated presentation of experimental trials, lead us to think that such word–face matching is/was overlearned and it should have been accomplished easily for all the expression categories. More importantly, (d) the happy face advantage remained when scenes (Experiment 2), rather than words (Experiment 1), were used as probes. Furthermore, in Experiment 2 only one negative (i.e., sad) expression category was used, which should have reduced or eliminated the competition between different negative-valence expressions.

²In this paradigm, it is likely that processing of the prime ceases with the onset of the probe, given that (processing and responding to) the probe is the critical task-relevant event. Nevertheless, such an assumption is not necessary for the logic underlying the assessment of the time course of affective processing of the prime. Rather, the important point is that priming (i.e., either facilitation or interference with probe processing) will occur when an affective representation of the prime has reached a certain activation level, be it prior to the onset or during the presentation of the probe.

³Lipp et al. (2009) have also reported affective priming for happy faces, as well as for angry, fearful, and sad faces, as primes (when presented at fixation, rather than extrafoveally), using positively and negatively valenced probe words. However, Lipp et al. did not use a neutral prime face condition. As a result, it was difficult to determine the relative magnitude of the priming effects as a function of prime emotional valence: More specifically, whether the congruent versus incongruent prime–probe differences (e.g., happy prime vs. angry prime, for pleasant probes) reflected facilitation due to congruent valence (e.g., happy–pleasant) or inhibition due to incongruent valence (e.g., happy–unpleasant). The use of a comparison condition (neutral prime face) in the current study revealed both positive and negative priming for happy faces.