Faces in-between: evaluations reflect the interplay of facial features and task-dependent fluency

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Facial features significantly impact social evaluations, influencing perceptions of attractiveness and trustworthiness.
• The processing fluency of facial features, or cognitive ease, affects affective consequences and subsequent evaluations.
• Task demands can modulate feature fluency, particularly when highlighting conflicts between specific features.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how facial feature fluency, influenced by task demands, affects social evaluations.
• To examine the role of affective consequences and cognitive ease in processing ambiguous facial expressions.
• To determine if task-specific categorization (emotional or gender) influences the devaluation of ambiguous faces.

Main Methods:

• Four experiments were conducted using faces with varying expressions (anger, happiness, mixed) and gender ambiguity.
• Participants performed categorization tasks (control, emotional, gender) before making social evaluations.
• Facial electromyography (fEMG) was used to assess physiological responses to facial ambiguity.

Main Results:

• Emotional categorization tasks led to the devaluation of mixed facial expressions, unlike control tasks.
• This devaluation was mediated by categorization disfluency, indicating cognitive processing difficulties.
• Facial electromyography confirmed that objective ambiguity drives the affective devaluation of mixed expressions.
• Gender ambiguity devaluation required a specific gender categorization task, highlighting task specificity.

Conclusions:

• The impact of facial features on social evaluations is moderated by processing fluency.
• Feature fluency is contingent on the current task, influencing how ambiguous stimuli are perceived.
• These findings have implications for understanding emotional responses to ambiguity and social perception dynamics.