Assessing the speed and ease of extracting group and person information from faces

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (FLFL110100199) and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (Social Interactions Identity and Well-Being Program).The human face is a key source of social information. In particular, it communicates a target's personal identity and some of their group memberships. Different models of social perception posit distinct stages at which this group-level and person-level information is extracted from the face, with divergent downstream consequences for cognition and behavior. This paper presents four experiments that explore the time-course of extracting group and person information from faces. In Experiments 1 and 2, we explore the effect of chunked versus unchunked processing on the speed of extracting group versus person information, as well as the impact of familiarity in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, we examine the effect of the availability of a diagnostic cue on these same judgments. In Experiment 4, we explore the effect of both group-level and person-level prototypicality of face exemplars. Across all four experiments, we find no evidence for the perceptual primacy of either group or person information. Instead, we find that chunked processing, featural processing based on a single diagnostic cue, familiarity, and the prototypicality of face exemplars all result in a processing speed advantage for both group-level and person-level judgments equivalently. These results have important implications for influential models of impression formation and can inform, and be integrated with, an understanding of the process of social categorization more broadly.PostprintPeer reviewe

Negative valence specific deficits in judgements of musical affective quality in alexithymia

Alexithymia is characterised by a lack of words for emotional experiences and it has been implicated in deficits in emotion processing. Research in this area has typically focused on judgements of discrete emotions rather than of affect, which is a precursor to emotion construction. In the current study, higher alexithymia was predicted to be related to more neutral judgements of valence and arousal of music representing a range of emotions. Participants (= 162) listened to ten 15-second musical pieces that represented five target emotions (happy, sad, tender, angry, and fearful) and rated the valence and arousal of each. Participants also listed emotion words they knew to be expressed in music. Analyses revealed that alexithymia was not related to the number of emotion words generated but was related to valence-specific affect judgements of music. Participants higher in alexithymia rated sad, angry, and fearful pieces as more neutral in valence and arousal. Alexithymia was not related to ratings of valence or arousal for happy and tender pieces. These findings suggest that perceptual deficits in alexithymia may be specific to negative emotions. Our results are consistent with the idea that alexithymia is related to the direction of attention away from negative stimuli

Assessing the speed and ease of extracting group and person information from faces

The human face is a key source of social information. In particular, it communicates a target's personal identity and some of their group memberships. Different models of social perception posit distinct stages at which this group-level and person-level information is extracted from the face, with divergent downstream consequences for cognition and behavior. This paper presents four experiments that explore the time-course of extracting group and person information from faces. In Experiments 1 and 2, we explore the effect of chunked versus unchunked processing on the speed of extracting group versus person information, as well as the impact of familiarity in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, we examine the effect of the availability of a diagnostic cue on these same judgments. In Experiment 4, we explore the effect of both group-level and person-level prototypicality of face exemplars. Across all four experiments, we find no evidence for the perceptual primacy of either group or person information. Instead, we find that chunked processing, featural processing based on a single diagnostic cue, familiarity, and the prototypicality of face exemplars all result in a processing speed advantage for both group-level and person-level judgments equivalently. These results have important implications for influential models of impression formation and can inform, and be integrated with, an understanding of the process of social categorization more broadly