A Face In The Crowd

Researchers have previously shown that happy faces, when presented individually, were recognized more accurately than faces with angry expressions.  In the context of other faces however, i.e., crowd scenes, the opposite finding has been noted by researchers with threatening or angry faces being detected more efficiently among a crowd of distractor faces than happy or nonthreatening faces. Published findings into the "face in the crowd" effect (also known as the "anger superiority effect") have been primarily based on artificial pictures of faces and efforts to extend the effect to faces of actual people have shown inconsistent results.As a result, questions have been raised about the ecological validity of "face in the crowd" research. A research study published in a recent issue of Emotion examined the face in the crowd effect using a visual search paradigm that placed real-life faces displaying actual emotional expressions, within heterogeneous crowds (varied facial expressions). Results confirmed that angry faces were found more quickly and accurately than happy expressions in crowds of both neutral and emotional distractors. These results are the first to extend the face in the crowd effect  to more ecologically valid conditions and thus provide compelling evidence for its legitimacy as a naturalistic phenomenon.   The researchers also discuss the evolutionary advantages to rapid processing of threatening vs non-threatening facial expressions.

For the abstract.