Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Facial expressions are fundamental emotional stimuli. They convey important information in social interaction. Most previous studies focused on the processing of isolated facial expressions. However, in everyday life, faces always appear within complex scenes. The emotional meaning of the scenes plays an important role in judging facial expressions. Additionally, facial expressions change constantly from appearance to disappearance. Visual scenes may have different effects on the processing of faces with different emotional intensities. Individual personality traits, such as trait anxiety, also affect the processing of facial expressions. For example, individuals with high trait anxiety have processing bias on negative emotional faces. The present study explored whether previously presented visual scenes affected the identification of emotions in morphed facial expressions, and whether the influences of visual scenes on the identification of facial expressions showed differences between individuals with high and low trait anxiety. Using the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), we placed 29 participants who scored in the top 27% in the high trait anxiety group (9 men and 20 women; mean age 19.76 � 1.3 years) and 28 participants who scored in the bottom 27% in the low trait anxiety group (11 males and 17 females, mean age 19.71 � 1.2 years). The images of faces (4 models, half male and half female) used in this study were selected from the NimStim Set of Facial Expressions. The face stimuli showed typical happy, neutral, and fearful expressions. Facial expressions were morphed to create a series of gradually varied images of facial expressions. Specifically, fearful face (100%) versus neutral face (0%) and happy face (100%) versus neutral face (0%) were morphed in 20% increments. In addition, 40 surrounding scene images were used, with 20 positive scenes and 20 negative scenes. In the face-emotion detection task, participants were asked to determine whether the emotion from the faces presented after the scenes were fearful, happy, or neutral. For the repeated measure ANOVA of the accuracy for facial expression detection, the results showed scene effects on the identification of emotions in facial expressions. The scene effects were varied between the different intensity of face emotion: for the emotionally vague faces, the detection of happy and fearful expression showed significant scene effects; for the faces with moderate emotional intensity, only the detection of the fearful faces showed significant scene effects; for the intense emotions on faces, there was a significant effect on happy and neutral faces but not on fearful faces. Trait anxiety as an individual factor was found to play a moderating role in the identification of facial expressions. For the high trait anxiety group, there were no significant differences in the accuracy of emotional detection between congruent and incongruent conditions. This means that the high trait anxiety group did not show significant scene effects. The low trait anxiety group showed a significant difference in the accuracy of identification of emotions in facial expressions between congruent and incongruent conditions, i.e., significant scene effects.In summary, the present study demonstrated that, for facial expressions with low emotional intensity, the identification of happy and fearful faces was more likely to be affected by visual scenes than the identification of neutral faces. Visual scenes were more likely to affect the identification of moderately fearful faces than moderately happy faces. Trait anxiety played a moderating role in the influence of visual scenes on emotional detection of facial expressions. Specifically, individuals with high trait anxiety were less affected by surrounding visual scenes and paid more attention to facial expressions.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Stereotypes are vital for social interaction by facilitating social decision making as well as conserving limited time and cognitive resources. Previous studies on stereotype activation mainly focus specific social groups, such as gender, race, etc. However, exactly how stereotypes are activated among various social groups remains unknown. To fill this gap, we classified social groups into four clusters according to stereotype content model in the present study, measuring for perceptions of warmth and competence. These clusters form a four-way axis, that is, high warmth-high competence (HW-HC), high warmth-low competence (HW-LC), low warmth-high competence (LW-HC) and low warmth-low competence (LW-LC). Two experiments were conducted to investigate the behavioral patterns of stereotype activation among these four clusters. We predicted that the stereotype activation pattern would be similar among these four clusters. In the first experiment, we employed a sequential priming paradigm to explore stereotype activation explicitly. The prime stimuli were 24 social groups equally attributed to these four clusters and the target stimuli were stereotype trait words of these 24 social groups. All of the prime stimuli and target stimuli were obtained from pilot study. The participants were instructed to judge whether the target word was consistent with the stereotypes of the prime social group. Fifty undergraduates (35 female, 19~25 years old, M = 20.68, SD = 2.08) were recruited for this experiment.In the second experiment, to validate the findings of Experiment 1, we utilized a lexical decision task to further investigate the stereotype activation patterns among the four clusters implicitly, using the same stimuli from Experiment 1. Pseudowords were also added, corresponding to the target words of Experiment 1. Participants were asked to identify whether the target word as a real word or pseudoword. Forty eight undergraduates (32 female, 19~25 years old, M = 20.64, SD = 1.93) participated in Experiment 2. Four (Social groups: HW-HC, HW-LC, LW-HC, LW-LC) � 2 (Consistency: consistent vs. inconsistent) repeated measure ANOVA were examined for response time and accuracy in both experiments. The results of Experiment 1 revealed classical stereotype activation patterns for HW-HC, HW-LC, LW-HC social groups while showing a reverse pattern for LW-LC social groups. Specifically, the participants responded more quickly and more accurately on consistent condition than on inconsistent condition for the former three clusters. However, when the prime stimuli were LW-LC social groups, the reverse was true; faster and more accurate response was shown for inconsistent condition rather than consistent condition. In Experiment 2, only real word trails were analyzed. The results of Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1. Therefore, classical stereotype activation patterns for HW-HC, HW-LC, LW-HC social groups and the reverse pattern of stereotype activation for LW-LC were relatively robust, both explicitly and implicitly, demonstrating the great differences among the stereotype activation patterns among these four clusters. The results of these two experiments partially support our hypothesis, while revealing an unforeseen reverse pattern of stereotype activation for LW-LC social groups. We hypothesize that this may be due to disgust elicited by LW-LC social groups. The present study expanded the research framework of stereotype activation and provided new behavioral evidence for the specificity of LW-LC. The mechanism underlying the reverse pattern of stereotype activation for LW-LC should be examined in the future.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2019-06-20
Abstract： Stereotypes are vital for social interaction by facilitating social decision making as well as conserving limited time and cognitive resources. Previous studies on stereotype activation mainly focus specific social groups, such as gender, race, etc. However, exactly how stereotypes are activated among various social groups remains unknown. To fill this gap, we classified social groups into four clusters according to stereotype content model in the present study, measuring for perceptions of warmth and competence. These clusters form a four-way axis, that is, high warmth-high competence (HW-HC), high warmth-low competence (HW-LC), low warmth-high competence (LW-HC) and low warmth-low competence (LW-LC). Two experiments were conducted to investigate the behavioral patterns of stereotype activation among these four clusters. We predicted that the stereotype activation pattern would be similar among these four clusters. In the first experiment, we employed a sequential priming paradigm to explore stereotype activation explicitly. The prime stimuli were 24 social groups equally attributed to these four clusters and the target stimuli were stereotype trait words of these 24 social groups. All of the prime stimuli and target stimuli were obtained from pilot study. The participants were instructed to judge whether the target word was consistent with the stereotypes of the prime social group. Fifty undergraduates (35 female, 19-25 years old, M = 20.68, SD = 2.08) were recruited for this experiment. In the second experiment, to validate the findings of Experiment 1, we utilized a lexical decision task to further investigate the stereotype activation patterns among the four clusters implicitly, using the same stimuli from Experiment 1. Pseudowords were also added, corresponding to the target words of Experiment 1. Participants were asked to identify whether the target word as a real word or pseudoword. Forty eight undergraduates (32 female, 19-25 years old, M = 20.64, SD = 1.93) participated in Experiment 2. Four (Social groups: HW-HC, HW-LC, LW-HC, LW-LC) × 2 (Consistency: consistent vs. inconsistent) repeated measure ANOVA were examined for response time and accuracy in both experiments. The results of Experiment 1 revealed classical stereotype activation patterns for HW-HC, HW-LC, LW-HC social groups while showing a reverse pattern for LW-LC social groups. Specifically, the participants responded more quickly and more accurately on consistent condition than on inconsistent condition for the former three clusters. However, when the prime stimuli were LW-LC social groups, the reverse was true; faster and more accurate response was shown for inconsistent condition rather than consistent condition. In Experiment 2, only real word trails were analyzed. The results of Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1. Therefore, classical stereotype activation patterns for HW-HC, HW-LC, LW-HC social groups and the reverse pattern of stereotype activation for LW-LC were relatively robust, both explicitly and implicitly, demonstrating the great differences among the stereotype activation patterns among these four clusters. The results of these two experiments partially support our hypothesis, while revealing an unforeseen reverse pattern of stereotype activation for LW-LC social groups. We hypothesize that this may be due to disgust elicited by LW-LC social groups. The present study expanded the research framework of stereotype activation and provided new behavioral evidence for the specificity of LW-LC. The mechanism underlying the reverse pattern of stereotype activation for LW-LC should be examined in the future.
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