Work

Sad people avoid the eyes or happy people focus on the eyes? Mood induction affects facial feature discrimination

Year: 2010

Type: article

Abstract: Depressed people tend to avoid eye-contact in social situations and in experimental settings, whereas happy people actively seek eye-contact. We report an experiment in which participants made discriminations between faces that had either configural or featural changes made to the eyes, nose, or head shape. The results showed participants induced to be happy detected changes in eyes more often than participants induced to be sad, but failed to detect changes in other facial features. Sad-induced participants detected changes to the head shape but not the eyes. The results are interpreted in terms of differential use of features attended to by happy and sad participants, whereby happy people are more likely to attend to eyes during face perception than sad people.

Source: British Journal of Psychology

DOI: 10.1348/000712610x519314

Authors: Peter J. Hills, Michael B. Lewis

Institutions: Anglia Ruskin University, Cardiff University

Language: English

Topic: Face Recognition and Perception

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funder: Economic and Social Research Council