Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 202

Would you predict that humans are faster at identifying a happy face or an angry face when the face is embedded in a crowd of non-happy or non-angry faces? Recall that Darwin argued that the ability to both read and signal emotions via facial expressions provide an adaptive advantage. It would seem, then, that individuals who quickly read and appropriately respond to facial expressions could more successfully navigate the social landscape. Therefore, you might expect that we would be adept at noticing expressions suggestive of potential threats to our well-being, such as angry faces (Reed, DeScioli, & Pinker, 2014). Several years ago, when I began writing this textbook, psychological research on facial recognition supported this notion. For instance, Hansen and Hansen (1988) asked participants to identify, as quickly as possible, a single divergent expression from a sea of faces. In some cases a happy face was hidden in a sea of neutral or angry faces, whereas in others an angry face was placed with neutral or happy faces. Almost invariably, angry faces were identified much more rapidly than happy or neutral faces. Hansen and Hansen (1988) dubbed this the face-in-the-crowd effect and found it whether the crowd faces were all of the same or different persons (Schmidt-Daffy, 2011).

However, relatively recent research has not only called this effect into question but has demonstrated the opposite one: People are actually faster at finding happy faces! Becker and Wright (2011) ran seven studies that reversed the way psychologists view facial recognition. Since the details about how they did this are too complicated to delve into here, I will give you the short version. Becker and Wright identified and eliminated a number of confounds with the earlier face-in-the-crowd studies that led the earlier researchers to mistakenly believe that the differences in their dependent variables were caused by the manipulations of their independent variables. Once Becker and Wright altered the experimental procedures, they found that smiling, happy faces were easier to spot. This was true even if they used closed-mouth smiles in which teeth were hidden. These researchers hypothesize that people are better at detecting happy faces because they are far more prevalent than are angry expressions and that happy faces have evolved to be more easily recognizable.