Inter-person and emotion contexts determine the influence of poser gender on emotion categorisation

The Happy Categorisation Advantage (HCA) describes the finding that happy facial expressions are categorised faster than neutral or negative expressions. This effect is influenced by the gender of the face, however, it unclear whether this influence is due to characteristics of the faces themselves or dependent on the experimental contexts in which the faces appear. A series of experiments was designed to investigate this. Participants categorised happy and angry emotional expressions on male and female faces. Poser gender was varied either within or between tasks. Additionally, the happy and angry expressions were either contrasted with each other or with neutral faces. The typical HCA was reversed for male but not female posers when male and female faces were present with in the same task. Additionally, no HCA emerged for either gender when happy faces were contrasted with neutral. However, when angry faces were contrasted with neutral, an angry categorisation advantage emerged for male posers and a neutral categorisation advantage emerged for female posers. Results demonstrate that the influence of face gender
on emotion categorisation depends not only on the gender and emotion of the target face itself, but also on the other faces with which it appears.