Judgment of emotion in human face stimuli: an individual differences analysis

Comparative judgments of the pleasure and anger dissimilarity between 80 face pairs were made by 100 male and female college students. The 80 face-pair stimuli were constructed by a systematic interchanging and deletion of four regions for anger and neutral face poses and for pleasure and neutral face poses. An individual differences analysis of the scaling data resulted in five like-perceiving subgroups of Ss. These subgroups were characterized on the basis of their differential use of face regions in making anger and pleasure dissimilarity judgments. The study illustrates the necessity of the individual differences approach to the study of cue utilization in the perception of emotion in human face stimuli.