Power and Emotion Perception from Faces and Bodies
Location
PANEL: Power & Challenges within Human Connection
CELA A019
Document Type
Presentation - Open Access
Start Date
4-26-2024 4:00 PM
End Date
4-26-2024 5:00 PM
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 this 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 including the sample’s unusual relationship with power, issues with stimulus materials or faulty methods are discussed along with directions for future research.
Keywords:
Power, Emotion perception, Face-Body Congruency Effect
Recommended Citation
Sato, Adrienne, "Power and Emotion Perception from Faces and Bodies" (2024). Research Symposium. 2.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/researchsymp/2024/presentations/2
Major
Psychology
Project Mentor(s)
Cindy Frantz, Psychology and Environmental Studies
2024
Power and Emotion Perception from Faces and Bodies
PANEL: Power & Challenges within Human Connection
CELA A019
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 this 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 including the sample’s unusual relationship with power, issues with stimulus materials or faulty methods are discussed along with directions for future research.
