title: Facial expressions depicting compassionate and critical emotions: the development and validation of a new emotional face stimulus set.
abstract: Attachment with altruistic others requires the ability to appropriately process affiliative and kind facial cues. Yet there is no stimulus set available to investigate such processes. Here, we developed a stimulus set depicting compassionate and critical facial expressions, and validated its effectiveness using well-established visual-probe methodology. In Study 1, 62 participants rated photographs of actors displaying compassionate/kind and critical faces on strength of emotion type. This produced a new stimulus set based on N = 31 actors, whose facial expressions were reliably distinguished as compassionate, critical and neutral. In Study 2, 70 participants completed a visual-probe task measuring attentional orientation to critical and compassionate/kind faces. This revealed that participants lower in self-criticism demonstrated enhanced attention to compassionate/kind faces whereas those higher in self-criticism showed no bias. To sum, the new stimulus set produced interpretable findings using visual-probe methodology and is the first to include higher order, complex positive affect displays.
authors.affiliation: School of Medicine, University of Cardiff, Cardiff, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Kirsten
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: McEwan
authors.affiliation: Mental Health Research Unit, Kingsway Hospital, Derby, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Gilbert
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
authors.forename: Stephane
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dandeneau
authors.affiliation: Centre for Psychological Research, University of Derby, Derby, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Sigrid
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lipka
authors.affiliation: Centre for Psychological Research, University of Derby, Derby, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Frances
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Maratos
authors.affiliation: College of Medicine, Biological Sciences and Psychology, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Kevin B
authors.initials: KB
authors.lastname: Paterson
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Baldwin
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D004644:Emotions; D004645:Empathy; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D012647:Self-Assessment; D055815:Young Adult