Neutral Face Expression Recognition and Big-5 Personality Trait Attributes

Document Type

Poster

Event Website

https://source2022.sched.com/

Start Date

16-5-2022

End Date

16-5-2022

Keywords

Personality, Emotion, Perception

Abstract

Prior research on facial expression recognition reveals that when individuals are exposed to neutral facial expressions, they label the perceived emotional state of the model’s face then create overgeneralized inferences of the model’s character that matches their emotional perception (Hester, 2019; Todorov et al., 2014; Todorov et al., 2013). Hester (2019) reported that female models who exhibited neutral facial expressions were misidentified as more angry, more threatening, and less attractive than male models exhibiting the same neutral facial expressions. Hester referred to this as the Perceived Resting Negative Emotion Phenomenon (Hester, 2019). Our study compared personality perceptions made by participants when they correctly versus incorrectly identified the emotion of a neutral facial expression. Three-hundred seventy-one participants (37.7% male; 62% female) completed the study survey via MTurk. Participants labeled each neutral face model with one emotion: either anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad, surprised (incorrect emotion labels), or neutral (correct emotion label). Using the Big Five Personality measure, participants then evaluated the model on the traits of extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness. Similar to Hester’s (2019) findings, participants in this study demonstrated significant differences in perceptions made about the agreeable and emotionally stable nature of a female model when emotion was incorrectly identified as anger or disgust. In contrast, male models were incorrectly identified as sad more than any other incorrect label, and perceptions of conscientiousness and emotional stability (neuroticism) were significantly different in comparison to correctly identified neutral expressions. Implications of this study and future directions are discussed.

Faculty Mentor(s)

Anthony Stahelski, Mary Radeke

Department/Program

Psychology

Additional Mentoring Department

Psychology

Streaming Media

Additional Files

Anderson, Amber Photos, Statistics, References. SOURCE 2022.docx (1611 kB)
Data and References

Share

COinS
 
May 16th, 12:00 AM May 16th, 12:00 AM

Neutral Face Expression Recognition and Big-5 Personality Trait Attributes

Prior research on facial expression recognition reveals that when individuals are exposed to neutral facial expressions, they label the perceived emotional state of the model’s face then create overgeneralized inferences of the model’s character that matches their emotional perception (Hester, 2019; Todorov et al., 2014; Todorov et al., 2013). Hester (2019) reported that female models who exhibited neutral facial expressions were misidentified as more angry, more threatening, and less attractive than male models exhibiting the same neutral facial expressions. Hester referred to this as the Perceived Resting Negative Emotion Phenomenon (Hester, 2019). Our study compared personality perceptions made by participants when they correctly versus incorrectly identified the emotion of a neutral facial expression. Three-hundred seventy-one participants (37.7% male; 62% female) completed the study survey via MTurk. Participants labeled each neutral face model with one emotion: either anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad, surprised (incorrect emotion labels), or neutral (correct emotion label). Using the Big Five Personality measure, participants then evaluated the model on the traits of extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness. Similar to Hester’s (2019) findings, participants in this study demonstrated significant differences in perceptions made about the agreeable and emotionally stable nature of a female model when emotion was incorrectly identified as anger or disgust. In contrast, male models were incorrectly identified as sad more than any other incorrect label, and perceptions of conscientiousness and emotional stability (neuroticism) were significantly different in comparison to correctly identified neutral expressions. Implications of this study and future directions are discussed.

https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/source/2022/COTS/10