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The influence of facial blushing and paling on emotion perception and memory

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Abstract

Emotion expressions facilitate interpersonal communication by conveying information about a person’s affective state. The current work investigates how facial coloration (i.e., subtle changes in chromaticity from baseline facial color) impacts the perception of, and memory for, emotion expressions, and whether these depend on dynamic (vs. static) representations of emotional behavior. Emotion expressive stimuli that either did or did not vary in facial coloration were shown to participants who were asked to categorize and rate the stimuli’s intensity (Exps. 1 & 2), as well as recall their degree of facial coloration (Exps. 3 & 4). Results showed that changes in facial coloration facilitated emotion categorization accuracy in dynamic (Exp. 1) but not static expressions (Exp. 2). Facial coloration further increased perceived emotion intensity, with participants misremembering the coloration of both dynamic and static expressions differently depending on emotion category prototype (Exps. 3 & 4). Together, these findings indicate that facial coloration conveys affective information to observers and contributes to biases in how emotion expressions are perceived and remembered.

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Data availability

Data is publicly available at https://osf.io/83b29/?view_only=fdb1894287bc41609a9d40ab8e2bf0bc. Materials will be made available upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Munsell Color Science Laboratory, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA

    Christopher A. Thorstenson

  2. Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina Aiken, Aiken, SC, USA

    Adam D. Pazda

  3. Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, UK

    Eva G. Krumhuber

Authors
  1. Christopher A. Thorstenson
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  2. Adam D. Pazda
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  3. Eva G. Krumhuber
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Contributions

CAT handled the experimental stimuli, designed the experiments, oversaw data collection, and contributed to the manuscript text. ADP conducted data analyses and contributed to the manuscript text. EGK contributed to the experimental stimuli, to the manuscript text, and designed the experiments.

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Correspondence to Christopher A. Thorstenson.

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The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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The study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of the University of Rochester.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Thorstenson, C.A., Pazda, A.D. & Krumhuber, E.G. The influence of facial blushing and paling on emotion perception and memory. Motiv Emot 45, 818–830 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-021-09910-5

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