Familiar Faces Appear Happier, Study Finds
Summary: New research shows that people tend to perceive faces they know as looking happier than unfamiliar faces, even when both express the same emotion to the same degree.
Source: APS
People perceive familiar faces as happier than unfamiliar ones, even when both faces display the same level of emotion, according to research published in Psychological Science.
“We show that familiarity with someone else’s face affects the happiness you perceive in subsequent facial expressions from that person,” explains Evan Carr of Columbia Business School. “Our findings suggest that familiarity—simply having repeated exposure to a person’s face—does more than influence liking or attractiveness; it also alters how you read that person’s emotional expression.”
Prior work has repeatedly demonstrated that people prefer things they know, whether those are objects, images, or other people. But why does familiarity lead to preference? Is it a conscious recognition that makes us feel more positive, or does familiarity actually change the way we perceive a stimulus? Carr and his colleagues Timothy F. Brady and Piotr Winkielman, conducting research while at the University of California, San Diego, tested whether familiarity could directly shape perceptual processes and enhance positive features of faces.
They ran two experiments in which participants viewed faces that had been morphed to vary in emotional content. The morphs produced a continuum of expressions ranging from moderately angry through neutral to moderately happy. In the first experiment, 50 undergraduate volunteers completed an incidental memory task in which they saw neutral images from one subset of faces while tracking unrelated visual stimuli on the screen. This exposure familiarized participants with some faces without calling attention to the faces themselves.
After this familiarization phase, participants completed a perceptual test in which they viewed pairs of faces and indicated whether the happier face was above or below a boundary line on the screen. Each pair always contained one face the participant had seen previously (familiar) and one novel face, and both faces displayed the same objective degree of emotion.
Results showed a clear bias: when the faces shared the same objective emotional intensity, participants were more likely to choose the familiar face as the happier one. This tendency grew stronger as the faces contained more positive features (for example, participants were more likely to label a familiar face as happier when the faces were 50% happy than when they were 25% happy). Importantly, the familiarity effect was not observed for angry expressions—familiar faces did not appear less angry than unfamiliar faces when expressions leaned negative.
In a second experiment, 40 undergraduate participants judged individual faces as either “happy” or “angry” and then rated the degree of happiness on a 0%–100% scale. The findings replicated the first study: familiar faces were more likely to be categorized as happy, but this advantage held only for neutral or positive expressions. Psychometric analysis showed that a familiar face required fewer objectively happy features to be classified as happy than a novel face did, indicating that familiarity shifts the threshold for perceiving happiness.
Overall, the experiments indicate that familiarity selectively enhances the impact of positive facial features. Familiarity appears to bias perception in a bottom-up manner, making mildly positive cues more salient and thereby increasing the likelihood that a familiar face will be judged as happy.
“Emotion perception isn’t only a formulaic readout of facial features,” Carr adds. “It dynamically incorporates cues tied to the individual you’re decoding. Even simple judgments like ‘how happy someone looks’ depend partly on your prior experience with that person and on the specific expression being judged.”
Source: Anna Mikulak, APS
Image source: Image adapted from the APS news release.
Original research: Evan W. Carr, Timothy F. Brady, and Piotr Winkielman, “Are You Smiling, or Have I Seen You Before? Familiarity Makes Faces Look Happier,” Psychological Science. Published online June 8, 2017. doi:10.1177/0956797617702003
APS. “Familiar Faces Look Happier Than Unfamiliar Ones.” NeuroscienceNews. June 19, 2017.
Abstract
Two experiments demonstrate that repeated exposure to a face increases the perceived happiness of that face’s expressions. Experiment 1 used a task design intended to avoid direct response bias and found that previously seen faces were judged happier than novel faces. Experiment 2 replicated this effect with a rapid “happy or angry” categorization task and psychometric analysis, showing that less objective happiness was required for a familiar face to be classified as happy. These results suggest that familiarity selectively enhances positive stimulus features, shifting how emotional content is perceived.