Grounding context in face processing: color, emotion, and gender

Sandrine Gil,Ludovic Le Bigot

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00322

Abstract

In recent years, researchers have become interested in the way that the affective quality of contextual information transfers to a perceived target. We therefore examined the effect of a red (vs. green, mixed red/green, and achromatic) background – known to be valenced – on the processing of stimuli that play a key role in human interactions, namely facial expressions. We also examined whether the valenced-color effect can be modulated by gender, which is also known to be valenced. Female and male adult participants performed a categorization task of facial expressions of emotion in which the faces of female and male posers expressing two ambiguous emotions (i.e., neutral and surprise) were presented against the four different colored backgrounds. Additionally, this task was completed by collecting subjective ratings for each colored background in the form of five semantic differential scales corresponding to both discrete and dimensional perspectives of emotion. We found that the red background resulted in more negative face perception than the green background, whether the poser was female or male. However, whereas this valenced-color effect was the only effect for female posers, for male posers, the effect was modulated by both the nature of the ambiguous emotion and the decoder’s gender. Overall, our findings offer evidence that color and gender have a common valence-based dimension.

Highlights

The idea that color can have affective meaning, and influences psychological functioning, is certainly not novel (e.g., Goldstein, 1942), but was elaborated upon in several recent studies (e.g., Elliot and Maier, 2007)
Results indicated that red has an affective meaning, consistent with previous findings based on the congruency effect (e.g., Gerend and Sias, 2009; Moller et al, 2009; Kuhbandner and Pekrun, 2013; Young et al, 2013)
Humans are often exposed to ambiguous information in everyday life, and the results of our experiment involving the processing of ambiguous stimuli indicated that as well as potentiating target information, red can cause ambiguous information to be perceived negatively

Summary

Introduction

The idea that color can have affective meaning, and influences psychological functioning, is certainly not novel (e.g., Goldstein, 1942), but was elaborated upon in several recent studies (e.g., Elliot and Maier, 2007). In this context, numerous studies have been conducted on the color red, which probably derives its strength of meaning from both evolution and experience. Even though the color-in-context theory developed by Elliot and Maier (2007) suggests that the same color can have different meanings in different contexts (e.g., Elliot and Niesta, 2008; Meier et al, 2012), red has been extensively associated with negative meaning, supported by two lines of research. A negative emotional target is more accurately and rapidly processed (Moller et al, 2009), more convincing (Gerend and Sias, 2009), and more salient, and better memorized (Kuhbandner and Pekrun, 2013) when it is perceived in a context (e.g., red) that evokes the same emotion

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