engleski

Happy face superiority effect in cognitive processing

Which affective component guides cognitive processing of emotional facial expressions? There are four possible answers to that question. According to the threat hypothesis, processing of angry faces is prioritized by human cognitive system, because rapid detection of threat has large adaptive value. The negativity hypothesis presumes that distressing emotional experiences of other people attract attention, regardless of whether they represent danger or not. The emotionality hypothesis proposes that positive emotional facial expressions can capture attention as effective as negative ones, while the happy face superiority hypothesis predicts that happy faces are prioritized by our cognitive system. In order to experimentally evaluate these four hypotheses, change detection paradigm tasks were used. In contrast to dot probe paradigm or visual search tasks, which most often provide evidence supporting the threat hypothesis, the change detection paradigm enables insight into later stage of information processing. Displays of human facial expressions were presented to 24 participants (12 male and 12 female, age range 20- 26), whose task was to detect changes of these stimuli, which could occur during inter-stimuli intervals. Each trial consisted of two displays: initial simultaneous display of six facial expressions and consequent test display. Between these two displays, blank screen was briefly presented as inter-stimuli interval. In half of trials, one of initially presented expressions altered during presentation of blank screen, while in the other half of trials there were no alterations. The results obtained show that happy facial expressions are heavily prioritized by human cognitive system. In explanation of these results, that clearly support the happy face superiority hypothesis, we propose that angry expressions are initially prioritized by our cognitive system, because we benefit from early detection of potential threat in the environment, but in later cognitive processing, happy expressions are given the priority, because smiling is a valuable mechanism for forming and maintaining cooperative relationships. Besides the theoretical relevance, the present study is also valuable methodologically, because we demonstrated that change detection paradigm can be efficiently used for the research of emotional facial expressions processing.

emotional expression; change detection paradigm; evolution of smiling

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