Social Perception
Analysis
Research 2019
Independent research project I conducted at The University of Massachusetts Boston about the affects of attractiveness on emotional perception.
My Role:
Study design, participant recruitment, Matlab scripting, Quantitative data analysis
Advisor:
Vivian Ciaramitaro
h
Does the attractiveness of a face bias how we perceive the emotion in a face ?
Hypothesis:
The face rated most attractive will be judged happier, have a lower point of subjective equality (PSE), compared to the face rated least attractive, indicating that it takes less happiness for an attractive face to be judged neutral.
Methods
Participants viewed 8 unique face identities (4 male/4 female), each morphed along an emotional continuum (80, 40, 20, 10% happy; the complementary angry, and neutral)
Each face morph was presented for 1 second and participants judged if the face appeared happy or angry, across 64 trial.
After rating the emotional valence of all face morphs, participants judged the attractiveness of the neutral face for each unique identity (1: very unattractive; 7: very attractive).
Analysis
Across participants, we calculated mean ratings of attractiveness for each face identity and determined the male and female faces judged most and least attractive overall.
We then calculated the point of subjective equality (PSE), the face judged happy or angry equally often, separately for the most and least attractive female and male faces.
-
The PSE was calculated by fitting group data for judgments of a given face with a cumulative normal.
To estimate variance in our sample, we subdivided participants, balancing gender ratios as best as possible, based on experimental conditions they participated in after the baseline conditions considered for this analysis.
Results
The most attractive face, female or male, showed a lower PSE compared to the less attractive face. This suggests that more attractive faces need to convey less happiness to be judged as happy, revealing a bias to see more attractive faces as more positive, emotionally. This trend was stronger for female compared to male faces, which showed larger PSE differences between the most and least attractive face.
