{"title":"Judging emotion in natural images of crowds.","authors":"Susan Hao, David Whitney, Sonia J Bishop","doi":"10.1037/emo0001358","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>It has been suggested that humans use summary statistics such as the average of the emotion of individual faces when they rapidly judge group emotion. Previous studies have mainly used faces of actors posing basic emotions, and morphed versions of these faces, against a plain background. In the present study, photographs taken in real-world settings were used to investigate the influence of mean facial emotion, maximal facial emotion, and background context on judgments of group emotion, assessed using dimensional ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance. Background context explained a significant amount of unique variance in group ratings for each dimension. Mean emotion explained additional unique variance for valence ratings, whereas maximal emotion explained additional unique variance for arousal, with dominance showing more mixed results. Removing background context and disrupting the contextual and spatial relationship between faces by randomly replacing faces with ones from other images within the stimulus set increased reliance on mean emotion. However, under all conditions, the maximally arousing face continued to exert an influence on ratings of group arousal, in line with theoretical accounts arguing for a unique bottom-up effect of emotional arousal on attentional competition and postattentive perceptual processing. Together these findings suggest that individuals' reliance on average emotion when judging crowd scenes differs as a function of the dimension of affect. In addition, the presence of background context both directly impacts judgments of crowd emotion and modulates the relative influence of maximal versus mean emotion on these judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":48417,"journal":{"name":"Emotion","volume":" ","pages":"57-69"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4000,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Emotion","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001358","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2024/8/29 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
It has been suggested that humans use summary statistics such as the average of the emotion of individual faces when they rapidly judge group emotion. Previous studies have mainly used faces of actors posing basic emotions, and morphed versions of these faces, against a plain background. In the present study, photographs taken in real-world settings were used to investigate the influence of mean facial emotion, maximal facial emotion, and background context on judgments of group emotion, assessed using dimensional ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance. Background context explained a significant amount of unique variance in group ratings for each dimension. Mean emotion explained additional unique variance for valence ratings, whereas maximal emotion explained additional unique variance for arousal, with dominance showing more mixed results. Removing background context and disrupting the contextual and spatial relationship between faces by randomly replacing faces with ones from other images within the stimulus set increased reliance on mean emotion. However, under all conditions, the maximally arousing face continued to exert an influence on ratings of group arousal, in line with theoretical accounts arguing for a unique bottom-up effect of emotional arousal on attentional competition and postattentive perceptual processing. Together these findings suggest that individuals' reliance on average emotion when judging crowd scenes differs as a function of the dimension of affect. In addition, the presence of background context both directly impacts judgments of crowd emotion and modulates the relative influence of maximal versus mean emotion on these judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
期刊介绍：
Emotion publishes significant contributions to the study of emotion from a wide range of theoretical traditions and research domains. The journal includes articles that advance knowledge and theory about all aspects of emotional processes, including reports of substantial empirical studies, scholarly reviews, and major theoretical articles. Submissions from all domains of emotion research are encouraged, including studies focusing on cultural, social, temperament and personality, cognitive, developmental, health, or biological variables that affect or are affected by emotional functioning. Both laboratory and field studies are appropriate for the journal, as are neuroimaging studies of emotional processes.
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