Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Interactions between Facial Expressions and Gender Information in Face Perception

You're Beautiful When You Smile: Event-Related Brain Potential (ERP) Evidence of Early Opposite-Gender Bias in Happy Faces

Studies of social cognition have shown gender differences regarding human face processing. One interesting finding is the enhanced processing of opposite-gender faces at different time stages, as revealed by event-related brain potentials. Crucially, from an evolutionary perspective, such a bias might interact with the emotional expression of the face. To investigate this, 100 participants (50 female, 50 male) completed an expression-detection task while their EEG was recorded. In three blocks, fearful, happy and neutral faces (female and male) were randomly presented, with participants instructed to respond to only one predefined target expression level in each block. Using linear mixed models, we observed both faster reaction times as well as larger P1 and late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes for women compared to men, supporting a generally greater female interest in faces. Highly interestingly, the analysis revealed an opposite-gender bias at P1 for happy target faces. This suggests that participants' attentional templates may include more opposite-gender facial features when selectively attending to happy faces. While N170 was influenced by neither the face nor the participant gender, LPP was modulated by the face gender and specific combinations of the target status, face gender and expression, which is interpreted in the context of gender-emotion stereotypes. Future research should further investigate this expression and attention dependency of early opposite-gender biases.

Women are expected to smile: Preliminary evidence for the role of gender in the neurophysiological processing of adult emotional faces in 3-year-old children

Children form stereotyped expectations about the appropriateness of certain emotions for men versus women during the preschool years, based on cues from their social environments. Although ample research has examined the development of gender stereotypes in children, little is known about the neural responses that underlie the processing of gender-stereotyped emotions in children. Therefore, the current study examined whether 3-year-olds differ in the neural processing of emotional stimuli that violate gender stereotypes (i.e., male faces with fearful or happy expressions) or confirm gender stereotypes (i.e., female faces with fearful or happy expressions), and whether boys and girls differ in their neural processing of the violation and confirmation of gender stereotypes. Data from 72 3-year-olds (±6 months, 43% boy) were obtained from the YOUth Cohort Study. Electroencephalography data were obtained when children passively viewed male and female faces displaying neutral, happy, or fearful facial expressions. This study provided first indications that happy male faces elicited larger P1 amplitudes than happy female faces in preschool children, which might reflect increased attentional processing of stimuli that violate gender stereotypes. Moreover, there was preliminary evidence that girls had larger negative central (Nc) responses, associated with salience processing, toward female happy faces than male happy faces, whereas boys had larger Nc responses toward male happy faces than female happy faces. No gender differences were found in the processing of neutral and fearful facial expressions. Our results indicate that electroencephalography measurements can provide insights into preschoolers' gender-stereotype knowledge about emotions, potentially by looking at the early occipital and late fronto-central responses.

The other-race effect in facial expression processing: Behavioral and ERP evidence from a balanced cross-cultural study in women

Although evidence for cultural variants in facial expression decoding is accumulating, the other-race effect in facial expression processing and its neural correlates are still unclear. We investigated this question with a fully balanced design, in which a group of East Asian and a group of European Caucasian women categorized pictures of sad, happy, angry, and neutral facial expressions posed by individuals of their own-race and the other-race. Results revealed a disadvantage in categorizing expressions of anger in other-race faces in both samples, and for sad expressions in the European sample only. Partially consistent, East Asian participants showed longer latency of the N170 component in the event-related potential (ERP) and European Caucasian participants showed larger N170 amplitudes to other-race faces. The late positive complex in the ERP was less distinguishable among other-race facial expressions. Therefore, the present study observed an other-race effect in early and late stages of face processing, reflecting less efficient structural encoding and less elaborate processing for other-race than own-race faces.

Others' Facial Expressions Influence Individuals Making Choices and Processing Feedback: The Event-Related Potential and Behavioral Evidence

To date, several studies have found the effect of facial expressions on trust decision, using the event-related potentials (ERPs). However, little is known about the neural mechanism underlying the modulation effect of facial expressions on making choices and subsequent outcome evaluation. In the present study, using an ERP technique, we investigated how the neural process of making choices and subsequent outcome evaluation were influenced by others' facial expressions for the first time. Specifically, participants played a modified version of the Trust Game, in which they watched a photo of the trustee before making choices. Critically, trustees' faces differed regarding emotional types (i.e., happy, neutral, or angry) and gender (i.e., female or male). Behaviorally, an interaction between expressions and gender was observed on investment rates. On the neural level, the N2 and P3 amplitudes were modulated by facial expressions in the making-choice stage. Additionally, the feedback-related P3 was also modulated by facial expressions. The present study proved the effect of facial expressions on making choices and subsequent outcome evaluation.

Event‐related potential response to drivers' facial expressions in an online car‐hailing scene

Recognizing facial expressions is crucial for adaptive social interaction. Prior empirical research on facial expression processing has primarily focused on isolated faces; however, facial expressions appear embedded in surrounding scenes in everyday life. In this study, we attempted to demonstrate how the online car-hailing scene affects the processing of facial expression. This study examined the processing of drivers' facial expressions in scenes by recording event-related potentials, in which neutral or happy faces embedded in online car-hailing orders were constructed (with type of vehicle, driver rating, driver surname, and level of reputation controlled). A total of 35 female volunteers participated in this experiment and were asked to judge which facial expressions that emerged in scenes of online car-hailing were more trustworthy. The results revealed an interaction between facial expression scenes, brain areas, and electrode sites in the late positive potential, which indicated that happy faces elicited larger amplitudes than did neutral ones in the parietal areas and that scenes with happy facial expressions had shorter latencies than did those with neutral ones. As expected, the late positive potential evoked by happy facial expressions in a scene was larger than that evoked by neutral ones, which reflected motivated attention and motivational response processes. This study highlights the importance of scenes as context in the study of facial expression processing.

Gender Biases in the Accuracy of Facial Judgments: Facial Attractiveness and Perceived Socioeconomic Status

Many studies demonstrate that people form their first impression of a stranger based on facial appearance, and these impressions influence their subsequent decisions and behaviors. However, much less research has examined the factors that moderate the accuracy of first impressions based on a photo of face. The present study included three experiments to explore gender differences in the accuracy of impressions based on faces. The results showed that people judge facial attractiveness more accurately for female faces than for male faces while giving more accurate wealth judgments for male faces than for female faces. Interestingly, although we did not find a significant correlation between confidence ratings and the accuracy of wealth rating, we recognized a significant moderate correlation between confidence ratings and the accuracy of attractiveness ratings when female participants rated male faces. To our knowledge, the present study is the first to reveal gender biases in the accuracy of impression judgments based on facial appearance. These findings imply a significant influence of traditional gender roles on accurate facial judgments.

The effect of fearful faces on the attentional blink is modulated by emotional task relevance: An event-related potential study

A fearful face as second visual target (T2) was detected better than a neutral T2 in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task. The advantage of fear over neutral emotion was originally attributed to a limited-capacity mechanism, in which fearful stimuli are prioritized for attention over neutral stimuli. However, more recent studies have shown that the prioritization of the processing of fear is strongly dependent on the emotional task relevance. Combining the RSVP task and Garner's paradigm, by varying the expression (fearful and neutral faces) and the emotional task relevance of the T2 (relevance: emotion classification task; irrelevance: gender classification task), this study aims to investigate the role of emotional task relevance on the advantage of fear during an RSVP task in which participants have to identify two visual targets in a stream of distractors. The behavioral results revealed that there was no significant effect of the expression on the task performance in the gender classification task. Fearful faces were easier to detect than neutral faces, but the T2 accuracy of fearful faces was lower than that of neutral faces in the emotion classification task. Furthermore, we found that the vertex positive potential and P100 components were enhanced for fearful faces compared to neutral faces independent of the emotional task relevance. For the P300 component, there was no significant difference in the gender classification task, but fearful faces elicited enhanced P300 amplitudes compared to neutral faces in the emotion classification task. These results indicated that the early processing of fear is automatic, while the late processing of fear is dependent on the emotional task relevance under limited attentional resources.

Gender Word Semantic Satiation Inhibits Facial Gender Information Processing

Abstract. In order to explore the time course of the influence of gender words semantic satiation on facial gender information processing, the semantic satiation paradigm was used to induce semantic satiation by presenting Chinese gender words “男, 女 (Male, Female)” for a long duration (25 s), with conjunction words “及(And), 且(Moreover)” served as the baseline (the Chinese words and their English translations do not completely equal in terms of pronunciation, form, and sense). Participants were asked to judge whether the two simultaneously presented faces (Experiment 1) or two successively presented faces (Experiment 2) were of the same gender. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the response time in semantic satiation condition was significantly longer than that of the baseline condition. The event-related potential (ERP) results of Experiment 2 showed that the peak amplitude of P1 component in semantic satiation condition was significantly smaller than that of the baseline condition in the early stage of face processing; N170, a specific component of face perception, in semantic satiation condition was significantly larger than that of the baseline condition. The average amplitude of LPC in semantic satiation condition was significantly smaller than that of the baseline condition. This study shows that facial gender information processing is affected by its semantic contextual information. The inhibition effect of gender word semantic satiation on facial gender information processing starts at the attention orientation stage, then continues to the face structural encoding stage, and eventually ends at the advanced cognitive response stage.