Emotional expressions of old faces are perceived as more positive and less negative than young faces in young adults

The Attitude towards a Stranger and Assessment of his Age based on a Photo Image of a Face Transformed in the FaceApp Application

The hypothesis of the study was the assumption that significant differences can be found in the attitude of the subject of perception to the object of perception (“model”) depending on the conditional age stage associated with age-related changes in appearance. Methods: 1) The procedure of “Photovideopresentation of appearance” by T.A. Vorontsova (a set of 36 photos transformed in the FaceApp application); 2) “Methodology for the study of conscious personal relationships to each member of the group and to oneself” by T.A. Vorontsova. Selection: 178 women and 156 men from 21 to 60 years old (M=37.24; SD=10.46). Results: 1) the attitude of subjects of perception to objects of perception significantly changes depending on the conditional age stage associated with changes in appearance: antipathy increases (in 64% of observations); antipathy decreases (in 36% of observations); disrespect increases (in 25% of observations); disrespect decreases (in 75% of observations); distance increases / decreases (50%); 2) gender differences in the dynamics of attitudes towards objects of perception were found: an increase in respect for men, in contrast to the multidirectional dynamics of respect for women. The recorded dynamics of relations reveals benevolent (an increase in respect) and hostile ageism (an increase in antipathy) towards older people who have obvious age-related changes in appearance. Also, the data obtained on the Russian sample confirm the existence of the age stereotype “a woman is getting old, a man is getting mature”. The data are discussed in connection with age stigma, the influence of additional factors, and the possibilities of using FaceApp in scientific research.

The role of spatial frequency information in the decoding of facial expressions of pain: a novel hybrid task

Spatial frequency (SF) information contributes to the recognition of facial expressions, including pain. Low-SF encodes facial configuration and structure and often dominates over high-SF information, which encodes fine details in facial features. This low-SF preference has not been investigated within the context of pain. In this study, we investigated whether perpetual preference differences exist for low-SF and high-SF pain information. A novel hybrid expression paradigm was used in which 2 different expressions, one containing low-SF information and the other high-SF information, were combined in a facial hybrid. Participants are instructed to identify the core expression contained within the hybrid, allowing for the measurement of SF information preference. Three experiments were conducted (46 participants in each) that varied the expressions within the hybrid faces: respectively pain-neutral, pain-fear, and pain-happiness. In order to measure the temporal aspects of image processing, each hybrid image was presented for 33, 67, 150, and 300 ms. As expected, identification of pain and other expressions was dominated by low-SF information across the 3 experiments. The low-SF preference was largest when the presentation of hybrid faces was brief and reduced as the presentation duration increased. A sex difference was also found in experiment 1. For women, the low-SF preference was dampened by high-SF pain information, when viewing low-SF neutral expressions. These results not only confirm the role that SF information has in the recognition of pain in facial expressions but suggests that in some situations, there may be sex differences in how pain is communicated.

Body Weight Can Change How Your Emotions Are Perceived

Accurately interpreting other’s emotions through facial expressions has important adaptive values for social interactions. However, due to the stereotypical social perception of overweight individuals as carefree, humorous, and light-hearted, the body weight of those with whom we interact may have a systematic influence on our emotion judgment even though it has no relevance to the expressed emotion itself. In this experimental study, we examined the role of body weight in faces on the affective perception of facial expressions. We hypothesized that the weight perceived in a face would bias the assessment of an emotional expression, with overweight faces generally more likely to be perceived as having more positive and less negative expressions than healthy weight faces. Using two-alternative forced-choice perceptual decision tasks, participants were asked to sort the emotional expressions of overweight and healthy weight facial stimuli that had been gradually morphed across six emotional intensity levels into one of two categories—“neutral vs. happy” (Experiment 1) and “neutral vs. sad” (Experiment 2). As predicted, our results demonstrated that overweight faces were more likely to be categorized as happy (i.e., lower happy decision threshold) and less likely to be categorized as sad (i.e., higher sad decision threshold) compared to healthy weight faces that had the same levels of emotional intensity. The neutral-sad decision threshold shift was negatively correlated with participant’s own fear of becoming fat, that is, those without a fear of becoming fat more strongly perceived overweight faces as sad relative to those with a higher fear. These findings demonstrate that the weight of the face systematically influences how its emotional expression is interpreted, suggesting that being overweight may make emotional expressions appear more happy and less sad than they really are.

Be Happy Not Sad for Your Youth: The Effect of Emotional Expression on Age Perception

Perceived age is a psychosocial factor that can influence both with whom and how we choose to interact socially. Though intuition tells us that a smile makes us look younger, surprisingly little empirical evidence exists to explain how age-irrelevant emotional expressions bias the subjective decision threshold for age. We examined the role that emotional expression plays in the process of judging one's age from a face. College-aged participants were asked to sort the emotional and neutral expressions of male facial stimuli that had been morphed across eight age levels into categories of either "young" or "old." Our results indicated that faces at the lower age levels were more likely to be categorized as old when they showed a sad facial expression compared to neutral expressions. Mirroring that, happy faces were more often judged as young at higher age levels than neutral faces. Our findings suggest that emotion interacts with age perception such that happy expression increases the threshold for an old decision, while sad expression decreases the threshold for an old decision in a young adult sample.