Is There Any Evidence That Some Emotions Expressed in the Face Can Be Detected Faster Than Others? Discuss This with Relation to Empirical Studies.

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There’s been other methods in investigating emotion processing such as the flanker task. This was created by Erikson & Erikson (1974), main idea is the central target is flanked on each side by a distractor, they used letters in original experiment (Quinlan & Dyson, 2008). However this has enabled researchers to gain further evidence for cognitive operations that are implicated in detection of facial expressions, for example Fenske & Eastwood (2003). Participants had to classify the central target face as expressing either a negative/positive emotion. Results showed reaction was fast regardless of what expression of flanker faces when target showed a negative emotion, however when central target face was a happy emotion there was flanker interference. This is known as the flanker asymmetric task, when positive expressions flanked by negative expression suffer from interference than negative expressions flanked by positive expression (Quinlan & Dyson, 2008).

However this was replicated by Hostmann (2006), this time using difficult schematic faces which made it more about perceptual characteristics, Fenske & Eastwood (2003) results were not replicated. This leads to the idea that stimuli used in facial processing experiments can change results. This is supported by Pessoa, Japee and Ungerleider (2005) who investigated fearful facial expression. Participants were presented with a target face, it was masked by another face, and target face was either neutral, fearful or happy. Participants had to say whether target faces showed fear or no fear and rate their answer (Quinlan & Dyson, 2008). Results showed high participant variability in detecting fear across various durations. They then concluded that participants were aware of masked faces, this has led researchers to believe evidence should be taken in caution when researching quick emotion detection.

Other ways to look at empirical evidence for detecting emotions, is through top – down goals, which Hahn and Gronlund (2007) did. They used visual search paradigms to investigate top down processing in attentional bias for threatening emotions, their findings were ‘when an angry or happy face were present in display in opposition to task goal, the reaction times were equal’ (Hahn & Gronlund, 2007). These results show no support for the angry superior effect. They later concluded ‘efficiency of facial expression search depends on the combined influence of top – down goal and stimulus characteristics’ (Hahn & Gronlund, 2007).

In conclusion, this essay shows evidence on some emotions expressed can be detected quicker than others, especially anger&happiness. However when conducting facial expression experiments, evidence must be closely looked at, due to schematic faces showed anger was detected quicker but for real life photos happiness was shown to be detected quicker. However fearful faces could be detected faster as it has its own detection system because of the amygdala. Due to contrasting pattern and effects Juth (2005) concluded ‘there are several aspects of visual search for emotional faces that are poorly understood’ (Quinlan & Dyson, 2008), this may explain why some of the research are contradictory.