Angry faces are more resistant to forgetting than are happy faces: directed forgetting effects on the identity of emotional faces

ABSTRACT

Using the item-method directed forgetting paradigm (i.e. intentionally forgetting specified information), we examined directed forgetting of facial identity as a function of facial expression and the sex of the expresser and perceiver. Participants were presented with happy and angry male and female faces cued for either forgetting or remembering, and were then asked to recognise previously studied faces from among a series of neutral faces. For each recognised test face, participants also recalled the face’s previously displayed emotional expression. We found that angry faces were more resistant to forgetting than were happy faces. Furthermore, angry expressions on male faces and happy expressions on female faces were recognised and recalled better than vice versa. Signal detection analyses revealed that male faces gave rise to a greater sensitivity than female faces did, and male participants, but not female participants, showed greater sensitivity to male faces than to female faces. Several theoretical implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Directed forgetting
• facial expression
• memory of faces
• sex differences
• facial recognition

Acknowledgements

Both authors equally contributed to this work. We would like to thank Dr D. Vaughn Becker and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. We also thank William Tov, Christie Scollon, and Woon Huey Hoon for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We also thank research assistants, Serena Nai, Adam Peter Frederick Reynolds, and Victoria Wong Shi Yin for their help in data collection.

Notes

1 Two participants did not understand the instructions related to the memory cuing; one recorded details of the faces she saw during the study phase; and one identified all faces as “old” during the recognition test. The exclusion of these four participants did not alter the significance of our results.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by a grant awarded to Hwajin Yang by Singapore Management University through a research grant [13-C242-SMU-020] from the Ministry of Education Academy Research Fund Tier 1.