The effects of happy and angry expressions on identity and expression memory for unfamiliar faces

We investigated the influence of happy and angry expressions on memory for new faces. Participants were presented with happy and angry faces in an intentional or incidental learning condition and were later asked to recognise the same faces displaying a neutral expression. They also had to remember what the initial expressions of the faces had been. Remember/know/guess judgements were made both for identity and expression memory. Results showed that faces were better recognised when presented with a happy rather than an angry expression, but only when learning was intentional. This was mainly due to an increase of the I remember" responses for happy faces when encoding was intentional rather than incidental. In contrast, memory for emotional expressions was not different for happy and angry faces whatever the encoding conditions. We interpret these findings according to the social meaning of emotional expressions for the self

Empathy and Oppositional conduct disordre in 8 to 12 years old children

A literature review underlines strong links between facial expression recognition difficulty, lack of empathy and behaviour disorder. The main goal of this study was to assess if, as it is suggested in the literature, oppositional children presented an empathy deficit that can make them more aggressive. Forty children between 8 and 10 years old (15 control children and 15 oppositional children) were subjected to the “Empathy Response Task” from Ricard et Kamberk-Kilicci (1995). As expected, results show that oppositional children are significantly less empathic that control children. Anger is often assigned to protagonists even when it isn’t present. This can be interpreted by the “hostile attribution distortion” according to wich the children with behaviour disorders tend to allocate hostile intentions to others (Milich & Dodge, 1984). Working on empathy must be integrated in behaviour disorder children therapy

The effect of ageing on the recollection of emotional and neutral pictures

This study investigated age-related differences in recognition memory for emotional and neutral pictures. Younger and older participants were asked to rate pictures according to their emotional valence, arousal, and visual complexity. Two weeks later they had to recognise these pictures and the states of awareness associated with memory were assessed with the "remember/know/guess" paradigm. We found that, although the influence of emotion on recognition accuracy (as assessed by d') was similar in both age groups, the tendency for positive and negative pictures to create a rich recollective experience was weaker in older adults. In addition., "remember" responses were more often based on a recollection of emotional reactions in older than in younger participants. We suggest that the elderly tend to focus on their feelings when confronted with emotional pictures, which could have impaired their memory for the contextual information associated with these stimuli

Affective valence and the self-reference effect: influence of retrieval conditions

Positive trait information is typically better recalled than negative trait information when encoded in reference to the self, but not when encoded in reference to someone else or when processed for general meaning. This study examined whether this influence of affective meaning is modulated by retrieval conditions. Participants encoded positive and negative trait adjectives in reference to themselves or to a celebrity. They were then presented with either a free-recall task (Experiment 1) or a recognition memory task (Experiment 2). Positive adjectives were better recalled than negative adjectives, but only when they were encoded in reference to the self. In contrast, encoding condition and valence did not interact in the recognition memory task. Taken together, these findings suggest that the difference in memory between positive and negative self-referent information is due, at least in part, to a control exerted on memory retrieval

Suppression and hypothesis testing: does suppressing stereotypes during interactions help to avoid confirmation biases?

Recent work indicates that trying not to think in stereotypical terms increases the accessibility of stereotypical information, which paradoxically results in more stereotypical judgments. The present study translated the colour-blindness ideology in general and stereotype suppression research in particular into an hypothesis testing setting. Participants who were asked to suppress their stereotypes when selecting a set of questions were indeed less guided by ambient stereotypes than control participants, thereby showing a reduction of the classical confirmation orientation in question preferences. Still, compared to control participants, suppressors also later reported more polarized impressions such that consistent targets were seen as more stereotypical and inconsistent ones as more counter-stereotypical. Moreover group evaluations were more stereotypical for suppressors than for controls indicating that suppression had led to stronger activation of the stereotypical representation. Results are discussed in light of the prevailing belief regarding the benefits of political correctness and colour-blindness. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd