The accurate perception of groups with outliers can help us identify potential risks. However, it is unclear how outliers affect the perception of group emotion. To address this question, we conducted a study on group emotion perception in the context of facial identity. We presented 74 participants with pictures of crowds, and asked them to evaluate the valence ratios and intensity of the crowd by means of the Emotional Aperture Measure. The results revealed that outlier emotions were often overestimated within crowds. Moreover, we found that the emotional expression of a close friend modulated the perception of outliers. Specifically, when a close friend expressed the group emotion, participants overestimated the outlier less than when a close friend expressed the outlier emotion. These results suggest that people can detect outliers within groups, and that their perception of group emotion is influenced by close friends. Thus, we provide evidence that facial identity affects group emotion perception.
AbudarhamN.YovelG. (2016). Reverse engineering the face space: Discovering the critical features for face identification. Journal of Vision, 16(3), 40. https://doi.org/10.1167/16.3.40
2.
AronA.AronE. N.SmollanD. (1992). Inclusion of other in self scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 596–612. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.63.4.596
3.
AwadD.EmeryN. J.MareschalI. (2023). Role of facial familiarity and emotional expression intensity in ensemble emotion perception. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 85, 1990–2003. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02720-6
4.
BaudouinJ.BrochardR. (2011). Gender-based prototype formation in face recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37(4), 888–898. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022963
5.
BeckerD. V.AndersonU. S.MortensenC. R.NeufeldS. L.NeelR. (2011). The face in the crowd effect unconfounded: Happy faces, not angry faces, are more efficiently detected in single- and multiple-target visual search tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140, 637–659. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024060
6.
BortolonC.LorieuxS.RaffardS. (2018). Self- or familiar-face recognition advantage? New insight using ambient images. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (Hove), 71, 1396–1404. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2017.1327982
7.
BradyT. F.AlvarezG. A. (2011). Hierarchical encoding in visual working memory: Ensemble statistics bias memory for individual items. Psychological Science, 22, 384–392. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610397956
ChoiY. M.ChongS. C. (2020). Effects of selective attention on mean-size computation: Weighted averaging and perceptual enlargement. Psychological Science, 31, 1261–1271. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620943834
10.
D'ArgembeauA.Van der LindenM. (2007). Facial expressions of emotion influence memory for facial identity in an automatic way. Emotion, 7, 507–515. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.3.507
11.
D'ArgembeauA.Van der LindenM. (2011). Influence of facial expression on memory for facial identity: Effects of visual features or emotional meaning?Emotion, 11, 199–202. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022592
12.
De FockertJ. W.MarchantA. P. (2008). Attention modulates set representation by statistical properties. Perception & Psychophysics, 70, 789–794. https://doi.org/10.3758/PP.70.5.789
13.
EgethH. E.VirziR. A.GarvartH. (1984). Searching for conjunctively defined targets. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 32–39. https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-1523.10.1.32
GoldenbergA.WeiszE.SweenyT. D.CikaraM.GrossJ. J. (2021). The crowd-emotion-amplification effect. Psychological Science, 32, 437–450. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620970561
16.
GriffithsS.RhodesG.JefferyL.PalermoR.NeumannM. F. (2018). The average facial expression of a crowd influences impressions of individual expressions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 44, 311–319. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000446
17.
HabermanJ.BradyT. F.AlvarezG. A. (2015a). Individual differences in ensemble perception reveal multiple, independent levels of ensemble representation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, 432–446. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000053
18.
HabermanJ.LeeP.WhitneyD. (2015b). Mixed emotions: Sensitivity to facial variance in a crowd of faces. Journal of Vision, 15(4), 16. https://doi.org/10.1167/15.4.16
19.
HabermanJ.WhitneyD. (2007). Rapid extraction of mean emotion and gender from sets of faces. Current Biology: CB, 17, R751–R753. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.039
20.
HabermanJ.WhitneyD. (2009). Seeing the mean: Ensemble coding for sets of faces. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 35, 718–734. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013899
21.
HabermanJ.WhitneyD. (2010). The visual system discounts emotional deviants when extracting average expression. Attention Perception & Psychophysics, 72, 1825–1838. https://doi.org/10.3758/app.72.7.1825
22.
HansenC. H.HansenR. D. (1988). Finding the face in the crowd: An anger superiority effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 917–924. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.917
23.
HaxbyJ. V.HoffmanE. A.GobbiniM. I. (2000). The distributed human neural system for face perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 223–233. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01482-0
24.
HochsteinS.PavlovskayaM.BonnehY. S.SorokerN. (2018). Comparing set summary statistics and outlier pop out in vision. Journal of Vision, 18, 12. https://doi.org/10.1167/18.13.12
25.
HollandA. C.O'ConnellG.DziobekI. (2021). Facial mimicry, empathy, and emotion recognition: A meta-analysis of correlations. Cognition and Emotion, 35, 150–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2020.1815655
26.
HuangL.YangT. Z.JiZ. M. (2003). Applicability of the positive and negative affect scale in Chinese. Chinese Mental Health Journal, 17, 54–56.
27.
KanayaS.HayashiM. J.WhitneyD. (2018). Exaggerated groups: Amplification in ensemble coding of temporal and spatial features. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 285, 20172770. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.2770
28.
KeyesH.ZalicksC. (2016). Socially important faces are processed preferentially to other familiar and unfamiliar faces in a priming task across a range of viewpoints. PLoS One, 11, e0156350. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0156350
29.
LiH.JiL.TongK.RenN.ChenW.LiuC. H.FuX. (2016). Processing of individual items during ensemble coding of facial expressions. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1332. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01332
30.
MihalacheD.LamerS. A.AllenJ.MaherM.SweenyT. D. (2021). Anger bias in the evaluation of crowds. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150, 1870–1889. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001025
31.
NatuV.O'TooleA. (2011). The neural processing of familiar and unfamiliar faces: A review and synopsis. British Journal of Psychology, 102(4), 726–747. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.2011.102.issue-4
32.
NeumannM. F.SchweinbergerS. R.BurtonA. M. (2013). Viewers extract mean and individual identity from sets of famous faces. Cognition, 128, 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.03.006
33.
PengS.LiuC. H.LiuW.YangZ. (2022). Emotion matters: Face ensemble perception is affected by emotional states. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 29, 116–122. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-021-01987-w
34.
PinoM.MontañoS.AgudeloK.Idárraga-CabreraC.Fernández-LucasJ.Herrera-MendozaK. (2019). Emotion recognition in young male offenders and non-offenders. Physiology & Behavior, 207, 73–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2019.03.015
35.
Sanchez-BurksJ.BartelC. A.ReesL.HuyQ. (2016). Assessing collective affect recognition via the emotional aperture measure. Cognition and Emotion, 30, 117–133. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2015.1015968
36.
Sanchez-BurksJ.HuyQ. N. (2009). Emotional aperture and strategic change: The accurate recognition of collective emotions. Organization Science, 20, 22–34. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1070.0347
37.
ŠvegarD.HorvatK.KardumI. (2019). Facial emotion recognition in violent men. International Journal of Psychology, 54, 786–790. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijop.12522
38.
Visconti di Oleggio CastelloM.WheelerK.CipolliC.GobbiniM.UrgesiC. (2017). Familiarity facilitates feature-based face processing. PLOS ONE, 12(6), e0178895. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178895
39.
WatsonD.ClarkL. A.TellegenA. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1063–1070. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.54.6.1063
40.
YangJ. W.YoonK. L.ChongS. C.OhK. J. (2013). Accurate but pathological: Social anxiety and ensemble coding of emotion. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 37, 572–578. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-012-9500-5
41.
ZhangF.ParmleyM. (2011). What your best friend sees that I don't see: Comparing female close friends and casual acquaintances on the perception of emotional facial expressions of varying intensities. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 28–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167210388194
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
