Explaining Sad People's Memory Advantage for Faces

Abstract

Sad people recognize faces more accurately than happy people (Hills et al., 2011). We devised four hypotheses for this finding that are tested between in the current study. The four hypotheses are: (1) sad people engage in more expert processing associated with face processing; (2) sad people are motivated to be more accurate than happy people in an attempt to repair their mood; (3) sad people have a defocused attentional strategy that allows more information about a face to be encoded; and (4) sad people scan more of the face than happy people leading to more facial features to be encoded. In Experiment 1, we found that dysphoria (sad mood often associated with depression) was not correlated with the face-inversion effect (a measure of expert processing) nor with response times but was correlated with defocused attention and recognition accuracy. Experiment 2 established that dysphoric participants detected changes made to more facial features than happy participants. In Experiment 3, using eye-tracking we found that sad-induced participants sampled more of the face whilst avoiding the eyes. Experiment 4 showed that sad-induced people demonstrated a smaller own-ethnicity bias. These results indicate that sad people show different attentional allocation to faces than happy and neutral people.

Keywords: anxiety; depression; eye tracking; face recognition; face-inversion effect; mood induction; own-race bias; ownethnicity bias.

FIGURE 1

Scatter plots of the relationship between: dysphoria and face recognition accuracy; dysphoria and inverted face recognition accuracy; dysphoria and configural processing; dysphoria and time to complete each trial; dysphoria and attentional focus; attentional focus and face recognition accuracy.

FIGURE 2

Example of the stimuli used in Experiment 2 with an original prototype (A) face with modifications: (B) eyes changed, (C) eyes replaced, (D) mouth changed, (E) mouth replaced, (F) nose changed, (G) nose replaced, (H) outer head changed, (I) outer head replaced.

FIGURE 3

Mean feature change detection accuracy for control, depressed, and anxious participants split by type of feature. Error bars show standard error.

FIGURE 4

An example stimulus with the AOIs mapped onto it: (1) Eyes; (2) nose; (3) mouth; (4) forehead; (5) chin and cheeks; and (6) the rest of the screen. AOIs were not visible to the participants.

FIGURE 5

Area-normalized time spent fixating in each AOI split by facial orientation and mood of participant.

FIGURE 6

Mean recognition accuracy for happy, sad, fearful, and neutral upright and inverted faces split by participant mood. Error bars represent standard error of the mean.

FIGURE 7

Area-normalized time spent fixating in each AOI split by face ethnicity and mood of participant.

FIGURE 8

Mean recognition accuracy for happy, sad, fearful, and neutral own- and other-ethnicity faces split by participant mood. Error bars represent standard error of the mean.