Face to face with an enactive approach: A sensorimotor account of face detection and recognition

The enactive approach to perception describes experience as a temporally extended activity of skillful engagement with the environment. This paper pursues this view and focuses on prosopagnosia both for the light that the theory can throw on the phenomenon, and for the critical light the phenomenon can throw on the theory. I argue that the enactive theory is insufficient to characterize the unique nature of experience specific to prosopagnosic subjects. There is a distinct difference in the overall process of detection (with respect to eye movement sequence) of familiar and unfamiliar faces in prosopagnosia; in contrast, normal subjects use the same scanning strategy when exploring both kinds of faces despite an obvious difference in qualitative character. In light of this limitation I outline a supplemental view basing sensorimotor contingencies upon the establishment and reaffirmation of regularities within the organism as it engages with the environment.     

Face to face with emotion: holistic face processing is modulated by emotional state

Negative emotions are linked with a local, rather than global, visual processing style, which may preferentially facilitate feature-based, relative to holistic, processing mechanisms. Because faces are typically processed holistically, and because social contexts are prime elicitors of emotions, we examined whether negative emotions decrease holistic processing of faces. We induced positive, negative, or neutral emotions via film clips and measured holistic processing before and after the induction: participants made judgements about cued parts of chimeric faces, and holistic processing was indexed by the interference caused by task-irrelevant face parts. Emotional state significantly modulated face-processing style, with the negative emotion induction leading to decreased holistic processing. Furthermore, self-reported change in emotional state correlated with changes in holistic processing. These results contrast with general assumptions that holistic processing of faces is automatic and immune to outside influences, and they illustrate emotion's power to modulate socially relevant aspects of visual perception.     

Unemployment and mental health: A neglected relationship

This paper reviews aspects of the existing theoretical and data base relating to unemployment and mental health. The literature indicates that job loss has predictable effects on individual sense of well-being and, further, that the effects differ in particular populations related to variables such as age, gender, and occupational background. The literature also suggests that early intervention after unemployment is likely to be important in ameliorating the undesirable effects on psychological well-being. Finally, the paper chastises mental health policymakers, especially in the United States, for their failure to devote resources to encourage investigations into mental health implications for workers and the unemployed.     

Face value: testing the utility of contextual face cues for face recognition

The presence of multiple faces during a crime may provide a naturally-occurring contextual cue to support eyewitness recognition for those faces later. Across two experiments, we sought to investigate mechanisms underlying previously-reported cued recognition effects, and to determine whether such effects extended to encoding conditions involving more than two faces. Participants studied sets of individual faces, pairs of faces, or groups of four faces. At test, participants in the single-face condition were tested only on those individual faces without cues. Participants in the two and four-face conditions were tested using no cues, correct cues (a face previously studied with the target test face), or incorrect cues (a never-before-seen face). In Experiment 2, associative encoding was promoted by a rating task. Neither hit rates nor false-alarm rates were significantly affected by cue type or face encoding condition in Experiment 1, but cuing of any kind (correct or incorrect) in Experiment 2 appeared to provide a protective buffer to reduce false-alarm rates through a less liberal response bias. Results provide some evidence that cued recognition techniques could be useful to reduce false recognition, but only when associative encoding is strong.     

Children's face recognition in different contexts: the role of encoding strategies

In this study, the relationship between face recognition and different facial encoding strategies was investigated. Children (6-8 years, N= 134) participated in both a face recognition task and an encoding task. During the recognition task, they saw 7 target faces in an eyewitness context (video) or in a neutral context (static black and white slides) which they later had to recognize from a set of 21 faces. On the encoding task, the same children had to categorize new faces (schematic and photorealistic) into two categories. The construction of the categories allowed participants to encode the faces either analytically (by focusing on a single attribute) or holistically (in terms of overall similarity). The results showed that face recognition was better in the social than in the neutral context. In the neutral context, only holistic encoding was connected to better face recognition. In the social context, children seemed to use not only information about the faces but also information about the persons.     

Consciousness of Social Face: the development and validation of a scale measuring desire to gain face versus fear of losing face

This article describes the development and validation of a scale that measures two distinct needs for individuals to manage their social "face". Scale development process resulted in an 11-item Consciousness of Social Face (CSF) scale made up of the following two correlated dimensions: desire to gain face and fear of losing face. The two-factor correlated structure of CSF scale was stable across multiple samples of both students and non-students subjects. The construct validity of CSF scale, including convergent validity, discriminant validity, and criterion-related validity was also demonstrated by examining relationships with other personality or demographical variables.     

Stable middle-aged face recognition: No moderation of the own-age bias across contexts

The own-age bias (OAB) has been proposed to be caused by perceptual expertise and/or social-cognitive mechanisms. Investigations into the role of social cognition have, however, yielded mixed results. One reason for this might be the tendency for research to focus on the OAB in young adults, between young and older adult faces where other-age individuation experience is low. To explore whether social-cognitive manipulations may be successful when observers have sufficient other-age individuation experience, we examined biases involving middle-aged other-age faces and the influence of a context manipulation. Across four experiments, young adult participants were presented with middle-aged faces alongside young or older adult faces to remember. We predicted that in contexts where middle-aged faces were positioned as other-age faces (alongside young adult faces), recognition performance would be worse than when they were positioned as relative own-age faces (alongside older adult faces). However, the context manipulations did not moderate middle age face recognition. This suggests that past findings that context does not change other-age face recognition holds for other-age faces for which observers have higher individuation experience. These findings are consistent with a perceptual expertise account of the OAB but more investigation of the generality of these results is required.     

Attending but not seeing: The "other race" effect in face and person perception studied through change blindness

We used a change blindness paradigm to examine the “other race” effect in perception. White Caucasian and Indian Asian participants viewed scenes in which White Caucasian and Indian Asian students were present. Changes were made either to the faces of the students, to their bodies or to an independent object in the background. Changes in faces were detected faster than changes in the bodies, which were in turn detected faster than changes in the background. For face detection there was a crossover interaction, with changes in White Caucasian faces detected faster than changes in Indian Asian faces by White Caucasian participants, whilst the opposite result occurred for changes in Indian Asian faces. In contrast, there was no effect of race on the detection of body-part changes or on the detection of changes to background objects. The results suggest that participants of both races attended equally well to subjects from the other race in the scene, but despite this they remained less sensitive to “other race” faces. Change blindness can provide a useful way of analysing attentional and memorial processes in social contexts.     

Application of a self-evaluation maintenance model to psychological health in interpersonal contexts

This study examines the possibility of applying Tesser's (1988) Self-Evaluation Maintenance Model, which focuses on self-esteem, to individual psychological health in interpersonal contexts. The participants consist of 243 college students divided into same-sex friendship pairs. The main findings show that when comparing oneself with an close friend in a domain one finds important, positive self-perception is more closely related to psychological health than a positive perception of the friend. In domains not important to the self, no relationship between psychological health and self-perception was found, regardless of the degree of intimacy. These results indicate that the degree of intimacy with the compared person and the degree of importance ascribed to the aspect being compared are connected with individual psychological health. These findings are discussed in relationship to application of the Self-Evaluation Maintenance Model to psychological health.     

Face needs,intragroup status,and women's reactions to socially aggressive face threats

Socially aggressive face threats (SAFTs) are messages that threaten one's identity or positive face. Given the potential negative consequences of being a recipient of such behavior, the role of positive face needs, intragroup status, and the face‐threatening nature of social aggression in predicting correlates of negative affect experienced as a result of being a target of SAFTs, including the face threat of the response, forgiveness, and well‐being was investigated. On the basis of the survey responses from 199 college‐aged women, findings indicated that targets' positive face needs and intragroup status are directly and indirectly associated with forgiveness and overall well‐being. Implications for these findings in relation to theorizing about face and intragroup identity, as well as limitations and suggestions for future research were provided.     

Competency to stand trial: rationalism, "contextualism" and other modest theories

Determinations of competency to stand trial in criminal cases are complicated and rendered unpredictable by two sub-surface issues that are rarely articulated: (i) the place of the defendant's rationality in the substantive standard(s) for competency and (ii) the level or degree of incompetency required to stop the criminal process. The rare references to these issues, mostly indirect, that are made in the cases, commentary, and competency testing instruments devised (including those civil as well as criminal) are examined. The conclusion that emerges is that the level of capacity and rationality required of the defendant depends much on context-the type of case, its relative complexity, and the values and stakes implicated in the outcome.     

Judging approachability on the face of it: the influence of face and body expressions on the perception of approachability

The aim of the current study was to examine how emotional expressions displayed by the face and body influence the decision to approach or avoid another individual. In Experiment 1, we examined approachability judgments provided to faces and bodies presented in isolation that were displaying angry, happy, and neutral expressions. Results revealed that angry expressions were associated with the most negative approachability ratings, for both faces and bodies. The effect of happy expressions was shown to differ for faces and bodies, with happy faces judged more approachable than neutral faces, whereas neutral bodies were considered more approachable than happy bodies. In Experiment 2, we sought to examine how we integrate emotional expressions depicted in the face and body when judging the approachability of face-body composite images. Our results revealed that approachability judgments given to face-body composites were driven largely by the facial expression. In Experiment 3, we then aimed to determine how the categorization of body expression is affected by facial expressions. This experiment revealed that body expressions were less accurately recognized when the accompanying facial expression was incongruent than when neutral. These findings suggest that the meaning extracted from a body expression is critically dependent on the valence of the associated facial expression.