Abstract
We investigated how memory for faces and voices (presented separately and in combination) varies as a function of sex and emotional expression (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral). At encoding, participants judged the expressed emotion of items in forced-choice tasks, followed by incidental Remember/Know recognition tasks. Results from 600 participants showed that accuracy (hits minus false alarms) was consistently higher for neutral compared to emotional items, whereas accuracy for specific emotions varied across the presentation modalities (i.e., faces, voices, and face-voice combinations). For the subjective sense of recollection (“remember” hits), neutral items received the highest hit rates only for faces, whereas for voices and face-voice combinations anger and fear expressions instead received the highest recollection rates. We also observed better accuracy for items by female expressers, and own-sex bias where female participants displayed memory advantage for female faces and face-voice combinations. Results further suggest that own-sex bias can be explained by recollection, rather than familiarity, rates. Overall, results show that memory for faces and voices may be influenced by the expressions that they carry, as well as by the sex of both items and participants. Emotion expressions may also enhance the subjective sense of recollection without enhancing memory accuracy.
Highlights
Recognizing and remembering specific people is a central aspect of daily interactions
Sex plays a key role in social remembrance, as research suggests that women perform better than men in face recognition tasks
We argue that it is essential that studies on recognition memory include several emotion categories as well as neutral expressions in order to elucidate which emotion expressions, if any, enhance accuracy
Summary
Recognizing and remembering specific people is a central aspect of daily interactions. These processes are often influenced by emotional and social nonverbal expressions that people infer from others’ facial appearance and tone of voice [1]. Several studies have reported evidence for a female own-sex bias in memory to the effect that women remember more female than male neutral faces (for a review, see [2]). We note that the previous studies on memory bias have focused heavily on the facial channel, leaving aside other important person characteristics such as the voice. Previous studies have mainly included neutral stimuli (e.g., [2, 3, 4]), despite the importance of emotional expressions for human interactions. The current study aims to investigate effects of item sex and participant sex, as well as the effect of emotion expression, on memory for both faces and voices
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