Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA.
Emotion. 2010 Feb;10(1):141-6. doi: 10.1037/a0017387.
The "face in the crowd effect" refers to the finding that threatening or angry faces are detected more efficiently among a crowd of distractor faces than happy or nonthreatening faces. Work establishing this effect has primarily utilized schematic stimuli and efforts to extend the effect to real faces have yielded inconsistent results. The failure to consistently translate the effect from schematic to human faces raises questions about its ecological validity. The present study assessed the face in the crowd effect using a visual search paradigm that placed veridical faces, verified to exemplify prototypical emotional expressions, within heterogeneous crowds. Results confirmed that angry faces were found more quickly and accurately than happy expressions in crowds of both neutral and emotional distractors. These results are the first to extend the face in the crowd effect beyond homogenous crowds to more ecologically valid conditions and thus provide compelling evidence for its legitimacy as a naturalistic phenomenon.
“人群中的面孔效应”是指这样一种发现，即在一群干扰面孔中，人们能够更有效地察觉到威胁或愤怒的面孔，而不是快乐或无威胁的面孔。该效应的研究主要采用了示意图刺激，而将其扩展到真实面孔的努力则产生了不一致的结果。该效应未能从示意图一致地转化到真实面孔，引发了对其生态有效性的质疑。本研究使用视觉搜索范式评估了人群中的面孔效应，该范式将真实的、经验证代表典型情绪表达的面孔置于异质人群中。结果证实，在中性和情绪化干扰者的人群中，愤怒的面孔比快乐的表情更快、更准确地被找到。这些结果首次将人群中的面孔效应从同质人群扩展到更具生态有效性的条件，从而为其作为一种自然现象的合法性提供了有力证据。
