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Published on: July 24, 2019
Memory for facial expressions: the power of a smile
Arthur P Shimamura1, Jennifer G Ross, Heather D Bennett
1University of California, Berkeley, California, USA. aps@berkeley.edu
Abstract:
Faces with expressions (happy, surprise, anger, fear) were presented at study. Memory for facial expressions was tested by presenting the same faces with neutral expressions and asking participants to determine the expression that had been displayed at study. In three experiments, happy expressions were remembered better than other expressions. The advantage of a happy face was observed even when faces were inverted (upside down) and even when the salient perceptual feature (broad grin) was controlled across conditions. These findings are couched in terms of source monitoring, in which memory for facial expressions reflects encoding of the dispositional context of a prior event.
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