Abstract
The perception and storage of facial emotional expressions constitutes an important human skill that is essential for our daily social interactions. While previous research revealed that facial feedback can influence the perception of facial emotional expressions, it is unclear whether facial feedback also plays a role in memory processes of facial emotional expressions. In the present study we investigated the impact of facial feedback on the performance in emotional visual working memory (WM). For this purpose, 37 participants underwent a classical facial feedback manipulation (FFM) (holding a pen with the teeth—inducing a smiling expression vs. holding a pen with the non-dominant hand—as a control condition) while they performed a WM task on varying intensities of happy or sad facial expressions. Results show that the smiling manipulation improved memory performance selectively for happy faces, especially for highly ambiguous facial expressions. Furthermore, we found that in addition to an overall negative bias specifically for happy faces (i.e. happy faces are remembered as more negative than they initially were), FFM induced a positivity bias when memorizing emotional facial information (i.e. faces were remembered as being more positive than they actually were). Finally, our data demonstrate that men were affected more by FFM: during induced smiling men showed a larger positive bias than women did. These data demonstrate that facial feedback not only influences our perception but also systematically alters our memory of facial emotional expressions.
Highlights
colleagues[17,18,19,20], there is ample evidence that such facial feedback manipulations influence the conscious processing of emotional facial expressions[13,21,22] and emotional body expressions[23], as well as the automatic processing of unattended facial emotional expressions[24]
We found a pronounced influence of the facial feedback manipulation (FFM) for high ambiguous faces; this is in line with theories of embodied cognition which assume that facial mimicry and its resulting facial feedback contribute to facial emotion recognition, especially when the senders’ expressions is a mbiguous[37]
The present study examined the influence of FFM on memory for emotional faces
Summary
colleagues[17,18,19,20], there is ample evidence that such facial feedback manipulations influence the conscious processing of emotional facial expressions[13,21,22] and emotional body expressions[23], as well as the automatic processing of unattended facial emotional expressions[24]. We assumed that the facial feedback manipulation influenced the encoding and retrieval of happy and sad facial expressions. One recent study by Pawling et al.[25] demonstrated that the visual re-exposure to a facial expression reactivated the corresponding mimicry in a similar way as did the initial exposure This emotional mimicry re-activation occurred when the same face identity was displayed with a neutral expression during the re-exposure. These results are in accordance with the reactivation account of memory, indicating that the same brain regions are activated during retrieval and encoding (for review see Danker and A nderson[26]). Following findings suggesting gender effects on recognition of emotional faces[28,29] as well as on facial m imicry[5,6,7,8,9], we assumed that memory performance might differ between women and men
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