The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, 5290002, Ramat Gan, Israel.
Faculty of Psychology, Department of Cognition, Emotion, Methods in Psychology, University of Vienna, 1010, Vienna, Austria.
Sci Rep. 2023 May 13;13(1):7792. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-34644-4.
Color carries gender information (e.g., red-female). This study explored whether background color could influence the gender categorization of human faces. Visual stimuli were generated from faces whose sexually dimorphic content was morphed monotonically from female to male perception. The face stimulus was presented upright (Experiment 1) and inverted (Experiment 2) with three background colors (i.e., red, green, and gray). Participants were instructed to categorize the gender of the face stimulus as male or female by pressing one of two labelled keys. Results showed that a red background could bias the gender of an ambiguous upright face toward a female compared with green and gray background colors (Experiment 1). However, this red effect was diminished when the face stimulus was inverted (Experiment 2). These results suggest that red background color interacting with facial configuration features biases gender perception toward a female face, possibly through top-down processing of learned associations between the color red and femininity.
颜色携带性别信息（例如，红色代表女性）。本研究探讨了背景颜色是否会影响人脸的性别分类。视觉刺激是由面部的性别二态性内容从女性感知单调地变形为男性感知生成的。面部刺激以直立（实验 1）和倒置（实验 2）的方式呈现，背景颜色有三种（即红色、绿色和灰色）。参与者被指示通过按下两个标记键之一来将面部刺激的性别归类为男性或女性。结果表明，与绿色和灰色背景颜色相比，红色背景可以使模棱两可的直立人脸的性别偏向女性（实验 1）。然而，当面部刺激倒置时，这种红色效应会减弱（实验 2）。这些结果表明，红色背景颜色与面部配置特征相互作用，使人的性别感知偏向女性面孔，这可能是通过红色与女性气质之间的学习关联的自上而下的处理。
