Abstract
Two experiments investigated the effects of masked happy and angry faces exposed for only 17 ms. Three questions were posed: do happy and angry faces attract attention equally to their spatial location? Does explicit detection of facial emotionality differ between happiness and anger? Do happy or angry faces give rise to stronger perceptual impressions? Results were compared with those previously reported for faces of positively and negatively evaluated famous persons. There was no evidence of attention orientation to either happy or angry faces, contrasting with previous evidence of orientation to/away from the faces of positively/negatively evaluated famous persons (Stone & Valentine, 2005b). Explicit detection of emotionality was more accurate for happy than angry faces, and the consciously experienced visual percept was stronger for happy than angry faces, both effects being similar to those previously reported for the faces of positively/negatively evaluated famous persons (Stone & Valentine, 2004, 2005a, 2005c). It appears that facial emotion and facial identity have some similar effects when perceived without awareness, dependent on positive or negative invoked affect. The attentional properties of famous faces may exceed those of emotional faces under some circumstances.
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