What people say, but not what they love or hate, affects speeded emotional expression recognition

Pleasant facial expressions, like happiness, are recognised faster than negative expressions such as anger or fear. The size of this happy face advantage depends on facial social category cues (larger for female, young or ethnic ingroup faces), facial attractiveness (larger for attractive faces), and person knowledge (larger for persons believed to be of good character). These findings are best explained by the evaluative congruence account, which holds that positive expressions are recognised faster when shown by relatively more positively evaluated posers. Experiment 1 showed that happiness is recognised faster than anger for posers who made positive statements about the participant or another person, but not for posers who made negative statements. Experiments 2-3 assessed whether these findings were due to evaluative conditioning (EC), which can shift poser evaluations by pairing poser images with positive or negative pictures or words. Although Experiments 2 and 3 successfully altered poser evaluations, there was no effect on expression recognition. These findings are not consistent with the evaluative congruence account and suggest that different types of knowledge about a person (what someone did, said or likes/hates), which all alter poser evaluation, differ in their effect on socially relevant processes such as expression perception.