The interaction of emotional facial expressions and memory recognition of humans' faces

Despite the breadth and diversity of research utilizing the human face there have been limited attempts to explore the interacting process of encoding and decoding of emotional facial expressions. This dissertation investigated the interaction between emotional facial expressions and recognition memory and consisted of three phases. Phase 1 was carried out to collect photos of emotional facial expressions (i.e., angry, happy, sad, and neutral). Seventy-five undergraduate and graduate students at The University of South Dakota participated in this phase and 567 photos of emotional expression were collected. Phase 2 involved 105 undergraduate students who were involved in standardizing the photographs obtained from Phase 1. This phase of the study resulted in a pool of 60 photos standardized for match between intended and observed emotional expression and intensity of emotion ratings. Phase 3 involved using the 60 standardized photographs with 99 undergraduates to test (a) whether memory for angry, happy, and sad facial expressions is better than for neutral facial expression, (b) whether memory of congruent faces (same person, same emotion) is better than incongruent facial expressions (same person, different emotions), (c) whether initial presentation of neutral expressions (versus emotional expressions) reduces error rate in correctly identifying inconsistency of emotional facial expressions and correctly naming the initial emotional facial expressions, and (d) whether performance at immediate recall is better than delayed recall. Paired-sample t-tests were used to analyze all four hypotheses. The results supported the theory of universal facial expressions. In addition, memory of emotional facial expressions was affected by the consistency of the emotions expressed at different times. However, neutral and basic emotional facial expressions produced similar memory performance. Furthermore, the data provided a great amount of support for long-term memory of emotional facial expressions. The findings supported the notion that emotional expressions may disrupt immediate retrieval but facilitate long-term memory performance. The results also suggested that negative affect at encoding interfered with immediate recall but aided in consolidation of emotional facial expressions.