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