Undergraduate Honors Thesis

 

The Effects of the Emotional State on an Observer in the Face in the Crowd Paradigm Público Deposited

https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/f7623d277
Abstract
  • The face in the crowd paradigm refers to a particular visual search task in which participants are asked to identify target facial expressions in a crowd of distractors. Previous research in this vein has suggested performance is enhanced for angry faces, an anger-superiority effect. There is however disagreement in many of these findings, and this disagreement may partly be explained by a failure to recognize the role of observer mood, response bias, and discrimination ability in the paradigm. The present study used a face in the crowd visual search task and assessed participant mood state using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. We hypothesized that mood state would be congruent to facial expressions most efficiently perceived. Multivariate analyses of variance showed instead that positive mood is associated with faster response times in emotional crowds, and negative mood is associated with faster response times in neutral crowds. A strong “no target present” response bias was also associated with neutral crowds, and this response was exacerbated by negative mood. These results suggest that mood does play an important role in visual search, one that may explain contradictory findings in the previous literature.
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Date Awarded
  • 2015-01-01
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Última modificación
  • 2019-12-02
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