抄録
The role of the facial expression of emotions on face recognition was investigated by analyzing the effects of happy and angry expressions on identity and facial expression recognition memory task. In Experiment 1, facial expressions at encoding and retrieval stages were manipulated by presenting the participants with happy, angry, or neutral faces in an incidental learning condition (rating their friendliness or distinctiveness). Later they were tested for their recognition of the identical persons displaying the same or different expressions (identity recognition task). They were also asked to name the initial expressions on the faces (expression recognition task). Results indicated that happy faces were better recognized than angry faces when presented with different expressions at the encoding stage irrespectively the encoding conditions. In contrast, happy expressions were not correctly responded for expressions at encoding on the expression recognition task. The results of Experiment 2 confirmed that the superiority of happy expression on the identity recognition task. It was concluded that happy expression enhanced the formation of facial memory representations.
