Luo Xin, Bartlett Megan, Nicholls Michael E R
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University, Sturt Road, Bedford Park, SA, 5042, Australia.
School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2025 Jul 10. doi: 10.3758/s13414-025-03124-4.
Previous research has shown that people tend to display attentional biases toward faces with strong emotions within crowds, often overestimating the extremity of the average emotional expression. However, this emotional amplification effect has not been consistently observed in tasks where observers summarize other crowd features, such as the number of faces. This study aims to explore the attentional mechanisms underlying these inconsistent findings. To do so, we recruited 584 participants across four online experiments and employed an equivalence judgment task to assess participants' ability to estimate the number of emotional faces. In the task, participants determined whether the number of two types of facial expressions within a series of crowds was the "same" or "different." Experiment 1 revealed that the number of emotional faces (angry and happy) was underestimated relative to neutral faces. Experiment 2 replicated this underestimation effect across different face types and exposure durations. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the emotional amplification effect may be caused by strong emotion contrasts within crowds. Experiment 4 confirmed that the underestimation of the number of emotional faces could be replicated in the numerosity estimation task with different instructions. Our findings suggest that people may strategically suppress attention to emotional faces to mitigate their emotional response. This study provides important empirical evidence to enhance our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying emotion perception and social behavior.
先前的研究表明，人们在人群中往往会对带有强烈情绪的面孔表现出注意力偏差，常常高估平均情绪表达的极端程度。然而，在观察者总结其他人群特征（如面孔数量）的任务中，这种情绪放大效应并未得到一致观察。本研究旨在探讨这些不一致发现背后的注意力机制。为此，我们通过四项在线实验招募了584名参与者，并采用等价判断任务来评估参与者估计情绪化面孔数量的能力。在任务中，参与者要判断一系列人群中两种面部表情的数量是“相同”还是“不同”。实验1表明，相对于中性面孔，情绪化面孔（愤怒和高兴）的数量被低估了。实验2在不同的面孔类型和曝光持续时间下重复了这种低估效应。实验3表明，情绪放大效应可能是由人群中强烈的情绪对比引起的。实验4证实，在不同指令的数字估计任务中，可以重复对面情绪化面孔数量的低估。我们的研究结果表明人们可能会策略性地抑制对情绪化面孔的注意力，以减轻他们的情绪反应。本研究为增进我们对情绪感知和社会行为背后认知过程的理解提供了重要的实证证据。
