Face size biases emotion judgment through eye movement

Abstract Faces are the most commonly used stimuli to study emotions. Researchers often manipulate the emotion contents and facial features to study emotion judgment, but rarely manipulate low-level stimulus features such as face sizes. Here, I investigated whether a mere difference in face size would cause differences in emotion judgment. Subjects discriminated emotions in fear-happy morphed faces. When subjects viewed larger faces, they had an increased judgment of fear and showed a higher specificity in emotion judgment, compared to when they viewed smaller faces. Concurrent high-resolution eye tracking further provided mechanistic insights: subjects had more fixations onto the eyes when they viewed larger faces whereas they had a wider dispersion of fixations when they viewed smaller faces. The difference in eye movement was present across fixations in serial order but independent of morph level, ambiguity level, or behavioral judgment. Together, this study not only suggested a link between emotion judgment and eye movement, but also showed importance of equalizing stimulus sizes when comparing emotion judgments

Why do ineffective treatments seem helpful? A brief review

<p>Abstract</p> <p>After any therapy, when symptoms improve, healthcare providers (and patients) are tempted to award credit to treatment. Over time, a particular treatment can seem so undeniably helpful that scientific verification of efficacy is judged an inconvenient waste of time and resources. Unfortunately, practitioners' accumulated, day-to-day, informal impressions of diagnostic reliability and clinical efficacy are of limited value. To help clarify why even treatments entirely lacking in direct effect can seem helpful, I will explain why real signs and symptoms often improve, independent of treatment. Then, I will detail quirks of human perception, interpretation, and memory that often make symptoms seem improved, when they are not. I conclude that healthcare will grow to full potential only when judgments of clinical efficacy routinely are based in properly scientific, placebo-controlled, outcome analysis.</p