The Effect Of Threatening Scenes On Self-face Recognition

Face recognition is a basic cognition of human beings,which is significant for human survival and social adaptation.In face recognition,it is very essential to distinguish and recognize self-face from others accurately and quickly.In the past,most of the researches on self-face recognition presented single face,but faces do not tend to appear in isolation in our daily lives;on the contrary,faces tend to appear in specific scenes.Therefore,it is necessary to explore the effect of scene information on self-face recognition.In addition,previous research found that threat information,such as self-evaluation threats,social evaluation threats,and mortality salience threats,can alter the recognition speed of self-face or others’ faces,but the effect of threatening scene information on self-face recognition was ignored.According to the individual environment,scenes can be divided into natural scenes and social scenes.previous research found that males were more sensitive to natural threat stimuli while female are more sensitive to social threat stimuli.However,whether the nature of scene(natural scene vs.social scene)and gender factor could modulate the effect of threat scenes on self-face recognition should be further explore.Therefore,there are two studies for the above issues in the current study.Study 1 explore the effect of scene information(negative scene vs.neutral scene)on self-face recognition;study 2 is to further explore how the threat scenes nature(natural scene vs.social scene)and gender factor modulate the scene information effect on self-face recognition based on the study 1.In the study 1,22 male and 28 female participants were asked to judge the target face(self,friend and stranger)familiarity in negative or neutral scenes.The result showed that negative scenes did not influence the face recognition in women.However,in men,negative scenes inhibited the recognition accuracy for stranger rather than self-face and friend face.The two experiments in study 2 explore the effect of natural threat scene on self-face recognition.25 male and 30 female participants were asked to judge the target face familiarity in natural threat scenes and natural neutral scenes.The result showed that natural threatening scenes did not influence the self-face recognition in women.However,in men,natural threatening scenes inhibited the recognition accuracy for stranger rather than self-face and friend face.The experiment 3 is to explore the effect of social threat scene on self-face recognition.23 male and 34 female participants were asked to judge the target face familiarity in social threat scenes and social neutral scenes.The result showed that the interaction effect between social threat and target face not significant in men.However,in women,social threatening scenes inhibited the speed of recognition self-face and friend face rather than stranger face.In conclusion,the present study revealed that the effect of threat scenes on self-face recognition can be commonly modulated by the nature of scenes(natural scene vs.social scene)and gender factors.In natural threat scene,the males reduce the response accuracies to recognize stranger face to ensure the response accuracies to recognize self-face and friend faces.while in social threat scene,the females have to spend more time and cognitive resources on recognizing self-face and friend face to analyze the link between social threats and self-relevant information so as to react to social threats effectively.