1. The study examined whether familiarity affects the ability to recognize emotions from faces. Participants learned to recognize 10 faces with happy expressions and were later tested on their ability to identify confused, disgusted, or neutral expressions on those familiar faces and unfamiliar faces. 2. The results showed that males had a larger familiarity effect, recognizing emotions more accurately for all familiar faces compared to unfamiliar faces. Females only showed improved recognition for the most difficult emotion, confused, on familiar faces. 3. The findings suggest that familiarity can help with more difficult emotion recognition tasks by allowing identity information to aid in determining the emotion being expressed. Familiarity effects were stronger for female faces even though emotions were equally accurate between male and

1. Posed images from Tottenham et al.(2009)
Genuine images from Tarrlabface-place.org keyassignmentwascounterbalancedacross3computers
The Role of Familiarity and Sex In Recognizing Spontaneous Emotional Expressions
Jessie J Peissig, Shiela M Kelley, Carol M Huynh & Erin M Browning
Department of Psychology,California State University Fullerton,Fullerton,CA
53.305
1. The ability to recognize emotion may be
affected by factors such as the sex of the face or
your familiarity with the individual
Does familiarity affect a person’s ability to
recognize emotion?
- Several studies support the idea that emotion and
identity are processes separately (e.g.,Bruce & Young,
1986;Young,McWeeny,Hay & Ellis,1986)
- There is some data that indicates that,under some
conditions,familiarity and emotion recognition do
interact (Elfenbein & Ambady,2003; Kirita & Endo,
2001)
Female emotional expressions may be easier to
recognize
- Females in general are thought to be better
“emoters”than males
- To control for this,we used facial expressions that
had been previously tested and chose ones that were
equivalent in accuracy for males and females
Females may be better at emotion recognition if
the task is more difficult (Hoffman,Kessler,
Eppel,Rukavina,& Traue,2010)
- Genuine expressions are more subtle than posed
expressions,therefore they should be more difficult,
increasing the possibility of finding sex differences
5. Across different expressions,male
participants showed a bigger familiarity effect
2.Methods
Learning Phase:
-Participants were familiarized with 10 individuals with
happy expressions (5 male/5 female)
-They were asked to make a series of judgments about each
face (e.g.,smoker/nonsmoker,attractive/unattractive),aimed
at increasing the depth of processing.
Testing Phase:
-Participants were shown the 10 learned individuals,plus an
additional 10 unlearned individuals (5 male/5 female)
-They were required to label the emotion of each face
-Faces were shown with confused,disgust,and neutral
expressions
Pre-Experiment Testing:
-Both the familiar and unfamiliar faces had been previously
tested for accuracy (mean of 50.9% accuracy for each set)
-There were two experimental groups,swapping which set
of 10 faces was familiarized
This research was supported by a California State University Fullerton Incentive
Grant.
Familiarity effects may be found only for
emotion tasks that are more difficult, such as
recognizing genuine emotions. In more difficult
discriminations, perhaps the identity system
can be accessed to aid in determining the
emotion.
3. Method for Testing Phase - Label the
Emotion (Confused,Disgust,or Neutral)
7. References
6. Conclusions
Bruce,V.,& Young,A.(1986).Understanding face recognition.British
Journal of Psychology,77,305-327.
Elfenbein,H.A.,& Ambady,N.(2003).When familiarity breeds accu-
racy:Cultural exposure and facial emotion recognition.Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology,85,276-290.
Hoffman, H., Kessler, H., Rukavina, S., & Traue, H. C. (2010). Expres-
sion intensity, gender and facial emotion recognition: Women rec-
ognize only subtle facial emotions better than men. Acta Psycho-
logica, 135, 278-283.
Kirita,T.,& Endo,M.(2001).Facial representations contain the infor-
mation concerning expressions:Evidence from primingexperiments.
Tohoku Psychologica Folia,60,45-60.
Tarrlab face-place stimuli database.Retrieved February 2,2009 from
www.face-place.org
Tottenham,N.,Tanaka,J.,Leon,A.C.,McCarry,T.,Nurse,T.A.,Marcus,
D.J.,Westerlund,A.,Casey,B.J.,& Nelson,C.A.M.,Hare,(2009).The
NimStim set of facial expressions:Judgments from untrained re-
search participants.Psychiatry Research,168,242-249
4. We found a significant familiarity effects for
female faces
Familiarity effects were driven largely by
enhanced responding to female faces, even
though the accuracy of identifying the
emotion was equal for male and female
emotion stimuli (as determined by a prior
validation study).
Males showed an overall improvement in
recognizing all emotions when the individuals
were familiar. Females showed improvement
only for the most difficult emotion (confused).
Perhaps males and females use identity
information under different conditions.
250ms
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UntilResponse
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Male Faces Female Faces
MeanProportionCorrect
Sex of Face Stimulus
Accuracy for Familiar/Unfamiliar Faces
Familiar
Unfamiliar
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1550
1600
1650
1700
1750
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1850
Male Faces Female Faces
MeanResponseTimeforCorrectTrials
Sex of Face Stimulus
Response Times for Familiar/Unfamiliar Faces
Familiar
Unfamiliar
0.5
0.55
0.6
0.65
0.7
0.75
0.8
0.85
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Confused Disgust Neutral
Accuracy
Familiar Faces
Unfamiliar Faces
0.5
0.55
0.6
0.65
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0.85
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Confused Disgust Neutral
Accuracy
Familiar Faces
Unfamiliar Faces
Male Participants,N=65
Female Participants,N=65
Identity and emotion recogniton do
interact, at least under some conditions.