Abstract
People can process multiple dimensions of facial properties simultaneously. Facial processing models are based on the processing of facial properties. The current study examined the processing of facial emotion, face race, and face gender using categorization tasks. The same set of Chinese, White and Black faces, each posing a neutral, happy or angry expression, was used in three experiments. Facial emotion interacted with face race in all the tasks. The interaction of face race and face gender was found in the race and gender categorization tasks, whereas the interaction of facial emotion and face gender was significant in the emotion and gender categorization tasks. These results provided evidence for a symmetric interaction between variant facial properties (emotion) and invariant facial properties (race and gender).
Highlights
Human faces convey significant amounts of information during social interaction
The analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed three significant main effects: face race [F(2,38) = 16.13, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.45], facial emotion [F(2,38) = 13.90, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.42], and face gender [F(1,19) = 5.44, p = 0.031, η2p = 0.22]. Those main effects were qualified by significant face race × facial emotion interaction, F(4,76) = 16.20, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.46, facial emotion × face gender interaction, F(2,38) = 11.19, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.37, and the three-way interaction, F(4,76) = 3.99, p = 0.015, η2p = 0.17
Many studies of face categorization use either only male faces (e.g., Craig et al, 2012) or both male and female faces (e.g., Zhao and Bentin, 2008). Both male and female faces were included, face gender as a variable has not been well-studied in previous research
Summary
Human faces convey significant amounts of information during social interaction. People with expertise in face processing can quickly and simultaneously process facial information from multiple dimensions. The Garner paradigm was originally developed to investigate whether two factors (e.g., object shape and color) were processed independently or Interference among Facial Emotion, Race and Gender interactively (Garner, 1974) Both task-relevant and taskirrelevant factors vary in the orthogonal condition and only the task-relevant factor varies in the control condition. Karnadewi and Lipp (2011) required people to perform race and emotion, gender and emotion, and age and emotion categorization tasks Their participants responded slower in the orthogonal condition than in the control condition in emotion categorization but not in race, gender, or age categorization. In three experiments with faces of three races as stimuli, the current study aimed at filling this gap in the literature
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