Happy face advantage disappears in Chinese context: The constancy of holistic processing for emotional faces

Abstract

It is well documented that facial identity is processed in a holistic manner. Chen & Cheung (2021) recently found that happy faces evoked a larger holistic face processing than angry faces in Caucasian context. Here we adopted the complete composite face paradigm to investigate how facial emotion influenced holistic processing of facial identity in Chinese context. In Experiment 1, we used Chinese faces with happy, neutral and surprise emotion. Participants judged whether the top halves of the two successively presented composite faces were same or different, while their facial emotion was always consistent in a trial. We found equal composite face effects (CFE) for the three emotional faces. In Experiment 2, either top halves or bottom halves were judged, and angry, happy, fearful and neutral faces were compared. Results showed that although judging the top half induced a larger CFE than judging the bottom half, the CFE was equal among four emotional faces. In Experiment 3, angry and happy faces with high/low emotional intensity were further compared. We also found equal CFE for angry and happy faces, which was not modulated by the emotional intensity. These results indicated that the holistic processing of facial identity is robust and constant regardless of emotion categories and emotion intensity in Chinese context. The relation between cultural difference and holistic processing of emotional faces should be considered in the future.