The look of fear and anger: facial maturity modulates recognition of fearful and angry expressions.
The current series of studies provide converging evidence that facial expressions of fear and anger may have co-evolved to mimic mature and babyish faces in order to enhance their communicative signal. In Studies 1 and 2, fearful and angry facial expressions were manipulated to have enhanced babyish features (larger eyes) or enhanced mature features (smaller eyes) and in the context of a speeded categorization task in Study 1 and a visual noise paradigm in Study 2, results indicated that larger eyes facilitated the recognition of fearful facial expressions, while smaller eyes facilitated the recognition of angry facial expressions. Study 3 manipulated facial roundness, a stable structure that does not vary systematically with expressions, and found that congruency between maturity and expression (narrow face-anger; round face-fear) facilitated expression recognition accuracy. Results are discussed as representing a broad co-evolutionary relationship between facial maturity and fearful and angry facial expressions.
Sacco
Donald F
DF
Department of Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, USA. saccodf@muohio.edu
Hugenberg
Kurt
K
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000786:Anger; D005149:Facial Expression; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014584:User-Computer Interface