What’s in a Face? How Face Gender and Current Affect Influence Perceived Emotion

Faces drive our social interactions. A vast literature suggests an interaction between gender and emotional face perception, with studies using different methodologies demonstrating that the gender of a face can affect how emotions are processed. However, how different is our perception of affective male and female faces? Furthermore, how does our current affective state when viewing faces influence our perceptual biases? We presented participants with a series of faces morphed along an emotional continuum from happy to angry. Participants judged each face morph as either happy or angry. We determined each participant’s unique emotional ‘neutral’ point, defined as the face morph judged to be perceived equally happy and angry, separately for male and female faces. We also assessed how current state affect influenced these perceptual neutral points. Our results indicate that, for both male and female participants, the emotional neutral point for male faces is perceptually biased to be happier than for female faces. This bias suggests that more happiness is required to perceive a male face as emotionally neutral, i.e., we are biased to perceive a male face as more negative. Interestingly, we also find that perceptual biases in perceiving female faces are correlated with current mood, such that positive state affect correlates with perceiving female faces as happier, while we find no significant correlation between negative state affect and the perception of facial emotion. Furthermore, we find reaction time biases, with slower responses for angry male faces compared to angry female faces.