Preference and Familiarity for Emotional Face

It is commonly assumed that happy face should be preferred over sad face, and yet tragic dramas and sad songs are popular and seem better memorized. Related studies showed that sad faces are perceived as more familiar than happy faces (Sergerie et al., 2007), and familiar faces are preferred over novel ones (Park et al., 2010; Liao et al., 2011). Connecting these two lines of studies would lead to a paradoxical conclusion that people should prefer seemingly familiar faces, namely, sad faces. We examine this by pairing an emotional face (happy or sad) with a neutral face of the same identity. All faces were new and viewed only once for each participant. The task was to rate relative preference and familiarity on the paired faces. Results showed that happy faces were preferred over neutral faces whereas sad faces were less preferred, providing empirical support for the common belief. However, while happy faces did not show any bias on familiarity judgment, sad faces were perceived as less familiar than neutral faces, inconsistent with Sergerie et al. (2007). That less favorable sad faces also appear less familiar suggests close relationship between familiarity and preference for sad faces but not for happy ones.