The Face in the Crowd Effect Unconfounded: Happy Faces, Not Angry Faces, Are More Efficiently Detected in Single- and Multiple-Target Visual Search Tasks
The Face in the Crowd Effect Unconfounded: Happy Faces, Not Angry Faces, Are More Efficiently Detected in Single- and Multiple-Target Visual Search Tasks
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DOI：
10.1037/a0024060
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发表时间：
2011-11-01
影响因子：
4.1
通讯作者：
Neel, Rebecca
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Becker, D. Vaughn;Anderson, Uriah S.;Neel, Rebecca
在一群人的脸上，是更容易发现生气还是高兴的面部表情？目前的研究使用了几种不同的视觉搜索任务，以评估人们是否有选择地参加表情的面孔。与广泛引用的研究相反（E。例如，在一个实施例中，Ohman，Lundqvist和Esteves，2001），表明愤怒的面孔“弹出”的人群，我们的文献回顾发现不一致的证据的效果，并建议低水平的视觉混乱不能排除作为驱动力背后的愤怒优势效应。然后，我们进行了7个实验，精心设计，以消除过去演示中存在的许多混淆变量。这些实验表明，没有证据表明愤怒的面孔会从人群中冒出来，甚至没有证据表明它们被有效地检测出来。相反，这些实验揭示了一种搜索不对称性，有利于快乐的面孔。此外，与大多数以前的研究相反，即使在消除了明显的知觉混淆（如通常在笑脸中显示的白色暴露牙齿的对比）的情况下，幸福优势效应也被证明是强大的。与其将这种效应归因于先天幸福探测器的存在，我们推测，人类对幸福的表达已经进化到更具视觉辨别力，因为它的交流意图比其他面部表情更不模糊。
Is it easier to detect angry or happy facial expressions in crowds of faces? The present studies used several variations of the visual search task to assess whether people selectively attend to expressive faces. Contrary to widely cited studies (e. g., Ohman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001) that suggest angry faces "pop out" of crowds, our review of the literature found inconsistent evidence for the effect and suggested that low-level visual confounds could not be ruled out as the driving force behind the anger superiority effect. We then conducted 7 experiments, carefully designed to eliminate many of the confounding variables present in past demonstrations. These experiments showed no evidence that angry faces popped out of crowds or even that they were efficiently detected. These experiments instead revealed a search asymmetry favoring happy faces. Moreover, in contrast to most previous studies, the happiness superiority effect was shown to be robust even when obvious perceptual confounds-like the contrast of white exposed teeth that are typically displayed in smiling faces-were eliminated in the happy targets. Rather than attribute this effect to the existence of innate happiness detectors, we speculate that the human expression of happiness has evolved to be more visually discriminable because its communicative intent is less ambiguous than other facial expressions.