Abstract
Two studies examined an unexplored motivational determinant of facial emotion recognition: observer regulatory focus. It was predicted that a promotion focus would enhance facial emotion recognition relative to a prevention focus because the attentional strategies associated with promotion focus enhance performance on well-learned or innate tasks - such as facial emotion recognition. In Study 1, a promotion or a prevention focus was experimentally induced and better facial emotion recognition was observed in a promotion focus compared to a prevention focus. In Study 2, individual differences in chronic regulatory focus were assessed and attention allocation was measured using eye tracking during the facial emotion recognition task. Results indicated that the positive relation between a promotion focus and facial emotion recognition is mediated by shorter fixation duration on the face which reflects a pattern of attention allocation matched to the eager strategy in a promotion focus (i.e., striving to make hits). A prevention focus did not have an impact neither on perceptual processing nor on facial emotion recognition. Taken together, these findings demonstrate important mechanisms and consequences of observer motivational orientation for facial emotion recognition.
Highlights
Faces are amongst the most relevant social stimuli as they communicate information essential for the course of social interaction and communication
This study served to test whether the impact of regulatory focus on facial emotion recognition is mediated by task-related patterns of attention allocation, as indexed by mean fixation duration
A multiple regression analysis with emotion recognition as the criterion and the two regulatory foci as predictors revealed that a stronger promotion focus predicted enhanced emotion recognition, (b = .06, SE = .02, p = .001, CIb,95% = [.024;.090]), whereas a chronic prevention focus was unrelated to emotion recognition (b = .01, SE = .01, p = .662, CIb,95% = [2.022;.035])
Summary
Faces are amongst the most relevant social stimuli as they communicate information essential for the course of social interaction and communication. The relevance of correctly recognizing emotions in others’ faces renders the identification of factors determining facial emotion recognition highly important. In this vein, the present research links facial emotion recognition to broad and basic motivational orientations, namely regulatory focus [8]. Regulatory focus is likely to affect emotion recognition, because regulatory focus has been shown to affect performance in well-learned tasks [11,12] that are performed (almost) without monitoring (i.e., attention to task execution) This clearly applies to facial emotion recognition as it is very routinely performed [13] and one might even ague that it is innate [14]
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