Ensemble representation for multiple facial expressions : evidence for a capacity limited perceptual process

We tested the processing capacity of establishing ensemble representation for multiple facial expressions using the simultaneous-sequential paradigm. Each set consisted of 16 faces conveying a variable amount of happy and angry expressions. Participants judged on a continuous scale the perceived average emotion from each face set (Experiment 1). In the simultaneous condition, the 16 faces were presented concurrently; in the sequential condition, two sets, each containing eight faces, were presented successively. Results showed that judgments varied depending on the number of happy versus angry faces contained in the sets and were sensitive at the single trial level to the perceived mean emotion intensity (based on postexperiment ratings), providing evidence of a genuine mean representation rather than the mere use of a single face or enumeration. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated Experiment 1, but implemented a different response format (binary choices) and added masks following each display, respectively. Importantly, in all three experiments, performance was consistently better in the sequential than in the simultaneous condition, revealing a limited-capacity process. A set of control analyses ruled out the use of enumeration or mere subsampling by the participants to perform the task. Collectively, these results indicate that participants could readily extract mean emotion from multiple faces shown concurrently in a set, but this process is best conceived as being capacity limited.</p

Research on household emergency supplies storage from the theory of planned behavior and intention-behavior gap in the context of COVID-19

IntroductionIn the context of COVID-19 epidemic, household-level emergency supplies are becoming a critical link in the national emergency response mechanism for public health emergencies. The main goal of this study is to analyze the forming process of household emergency supplies storage intention and behavior based on the theory of planned behavior.MethodsA total of 486 valid questionnaires were obtained from China and analyzed using structural equation modeling.ResultsThe study found that subjective norms and perceived behavioral control had a positive impact on residents’ intention to store emergency supplies, while attitudes did not play a significant role. Community institutional trust and community network play significant moderating roles in the transformation from intentions to behaviors.DiscussionThis study explored the influencing factors of residents’ household emergency supplies storage, and introduced community institutional trust and community network as moderating variables to analyze the process of transformation of residents’ household emergency supplies storage intentions to behaviors from the perspective of community situation, and initially constructed a two-stage integration model including intention formation and behavior transformation. By analyzing the forming process of household emergency supplies behavior, this paper revealed the effective paths for the formation of household emergency supplies storage intention, and put forward policy suggestions from the government and community levels

Processing of Individual Items during Ensemble Coding of Facial Expressions

There is growing evidence that human observers are able to extract the mean emotion or other type of information from a set of faces. The most intriguing aspect of this phenomenon is that observers often fail to identify or form a representation for individual faces in a face set. However, most of these results were based on judgments under limited processing resource. We examined a wider range of exposure time and observed how the relationship between the extraction of a mean and representation of individual facial expressions would change. The results showed that with an exposure time of 50 ms for the faces, observers were more sensitive to mean representation over individual representation, replicating the typical findings in the literature. With longer exposure time, however, observers were able to extract both individual and mean representation more accurately. Furthermore, diffusion model analysis revealed that the mean representation is also more prone to suffer from the noise accumulated in redundant processing time and leads to a more conservative decision bias, whereas individual representations seem more resistant to this noise. Results suggest that the encoding of emotional information from multiple faces may take two forms: single face processing and crowd face processi

Emotional effects on age estimates

Observers can infer a person’s age from the face, but not perfectly, and emotional expressions have been shown to affect these judgments. However, the effect of expressions on age perception is still not well understood. In this study, we first asked young Asian participants to estimate the age of young, middle-aged, and older Caucasian faces previously used (Experiment 1), and additionally recruited young, middle-aged, and older Asian participants to estimate both Caucasian and Asian faces (Experiment 2), to examine how face age and participant age modulate the emotional effects on age estimates. The results replicated previous findings that happy faces were perceived as older than neutral faces when faces were young. Importantly, the strength that emotional expressions make young faces look older was larger as participants became older. Interestingly, the aging effect of expressions was also larger in the other-race (i.e., Caucasian) than the own-race (i.e., Asian) faces. When faces were older, smiling did not age the faces, regardless of participant age or face race. Our results suggest that the transient aging cues brought by facial expressions, like the smile or frown-related wrinkles, seemed to be weighted differently during age estimation, depending on both the characteristics of faces and observers

Effects of emotional variability on social evaluations of faces

A previous study found that people made more positive evaluations for the faces on several social dimensions (e.g., authenticity, happiness, and trust) when the faces showed higher emotional variability (i.e., larger range or larger number of emotion types) relative to lower emotional variability (i.e., smaller range or smaller number of emotion types), because they perceived more authenticity in high emotional variability (Slepian &amp; Carr, 2019). Our previous experiment, on the other hand, showed that faces with low emotional variability were given more positive ratings compared to high emotional variability, contrary to Slepian &amp; Carr (2019). However, in this previous experiment, the high variability condition included a broader range of emotions, incorporating faces with more extreme intensities of happiness and anger. Therefore, in this current study, we controlled the intensity of the most extreme emotions in the face sets with low and high emotional variability, and used an extended set of rating words. We hypothesized that faces with low emotional variability had more positive social evaluations, and the effect of emotional variability was not solely due to differences in the range of emotions

Ensemble perception of multiple face ages

This study is aimed to directly examine whether observers have the ability to extract the mean age from multiple faces presented simultanesously and to explore the underlying cognitive mechanism of ensemble perceptino of face ages