Premium
Happy to See Me, Aren’t You, Sally? Signal Detection Analysis of Emotion Detection in Briefly Presented Male and Female Faces
Author(s) -
PIXTON TONYA S.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.2011.00879.x
Subject(s) - psychology , stimulus (psychology) , social psychology , facial expression , response bias , emotional expression , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , communication
Pixton, T. S. (2011). Happy to see me, aren’t you, Sally? Signal detection analysis of emotion detection in briefly presented male and female faces. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 52 , 361–368. Using signal detection methods, possible effects of emotion type (happy, angry), gender of the stimulus face, and gender of the participant on the detection and response bias of emotion in briefly presented faces were investigated. Fifty‐seven participants (28 men, 29 women) viewed 90 briefly presented faces (30 happy, 30 angry, and 30 neutral, each with 15 male and 15 female faces) answering yes if the face was perceived as emotional and no if it was not perceived as emotional. Sensitivity [ d ’, z(hit rate) minus z(false alarm rate)] and response bias (β, likelihood ratio of “signal plus noise” vs. “noise”) were measured for each face combination for each presentation time (6.25, 12.50, 18.75, 25.00, 31.25 ms). The d ’ values were higher for happy than for angry faces and higher for angry‐male than for angry‐female faces, and there were no effects of gender‐of‐participant. Results also suggest a greater tendency for participants to judge happy‐female faces as emotional, as shown by lower β values for these faces as compared to the other emotion‐gender combinations. This happy‐female response bias suggests, at least, a partial explanation to happy‐superiority effects in studies where performance is only measured as percent correct responses, and, in general, that women are expected to be happy.