Degree Year

2024

Document Type

Thesis - Oberlin Community Only

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Psychology

Advisor(s)

Cynthia Frantz

Committee Member(s)

Clinton Merck
Travis Wilson

Keywords

Power, Emotion, Emotion recognition, Face-body congruency effect

Abstract

The Face-Body Congruency Effect (FBCE) refers to the phenomenon whereby individuals are less accurate when categorizing emotional expressions from faces or bodies when the expression is paired with an incongruent emotional cue. Civile and Obhi (2016) discovered that priming individuals to feel powerful decreased the steepness of the FBCE for those individuals. The current research sought to simultaneously replicate these findings and investigate the mechanisms driving the effect. In the current study, participants were randomly assigned to a power-priming condition or a control group and then asked to complete two emotion-recognition tasks in a randomized order. One task asked participants to quickly identify emotion from facial expressions while ignoring sometimes incongruent body language, and the other task asked participants to quickly identify emotion from bodies while ignoring sometimes incongruent facial expressions. Results indicated an overall effect of the FBCE, however in the face-recognition task, individuals were surprisingly more accurate at identifying faces when body language was incongruent. Individuals were also more accurate in the face task than the body task overall. No impact of power priming was identified in any analyses. Potential explanations for these results – the sample’s unusual relationship with power, issues with stimulus materials, faulty methods – are discussed along with directions for future research.

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