Role of facial familiarity and emotional expression intensity in ensemble emotion perception.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Awad, Deema Emery, Nathan J. Mareschal, Isabelle
Abstract	When looking at groups of people, we can extract information from the different faces to derive properties of the group, such as its average facial emotion, although how this average is computed remains a matter of debate. Here, we examined whether our participants’ personal familiarity with the faces in the group, as well as the intensity of the facial expressions, biased ensemble perception. Participants judged the average emotional expression of ensembles of four different identities whose expressions depicted either neutral, angry, or happy emotions. For the angry and happy expressions, the intensity of the emotion could be either low (e.g., slightly happy) or high (very happy). When all the identities in the ensemble were unfamiliar, the presence of any high intensity emotional face biased ensemble perception towards its emotion. However, when a familiar face was present in the ensemble, perception was biased towards the familiar face’s emotion regardless of its intensity. These findings reveal that how we perceive the average emotion of a group is influenced by both the emotional intensity and familiarity of the faces comprising the group, supporting the idea that different faces may be weighted differently in ensemble perception. These findings have important implications for the judgements we make about a group’s overall emotional state may be biased by individuals within the group.
Related Links	https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC10202360&blobtype=pdf
ISSN	19433921
Journal	Attention, Perception & Psychophysics [Atten Percept Psychophys]
Volume Number	85
DOI	10.3758/s13414-023-02720-6
PubMed Central reference number	PMC10202360
Issue Number	6
PubMed reference number	37217820
e-ISSN	1943393X
Language	English
Publisher	Springer US
Publisher Date	2023-05-22
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. © Crown 2023
Subject Keyword	Face perception Familiarity Ensemble perception Emotions
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Sensory Systems Linguistics and Language