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Updated: May 24, 2026

Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome
Published on: July 31, 2016
Flexible and inflexible task sets: asymmetric interference when switching between emotional expression, sex, and age
Stefanie Schuch1, Katja Werheid, Iring Koch
1Institute of Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany. schuch@psych.rwth-aachen.de
Abstract:
The present study investigated whether the processing characteristics of categorizing emotional facial expressions are different from those of categorizing facial age and sex information. Given that emotions change rapidly, it was hypothesized that processing facial expressions involves a more flexible task set that causes less between-task interference than the task sets involved in processing age or sex of a face. Participants switched between three tasks: categorizing a face as looking happy or angry (emotion task), young or old (age task), and male or female (sex task). Interference between tasks was measured by global interference and response interference. Both measures revealed patterns of asymmetric interference. Global between-task interference was reduced when a task was mixed with the emotion task. Response interference, as measured by congruency effects, was larger for the emotion task than for the nonemotional tasks. The results support the idea that processing emotional facial expression constitutes a more flexible task set that causes less interference (i.e., task-set "inertia") than processing the age or sex of a face.
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