Stereotypical processing of emotional faces: Perceptual and decisional components

People tend to associate anger with male faces and happiness or surprise with female
faces. This angry-men-happy-women bias has been ascribed to either top-down (e.g.,
well-learned stereotypes) or bottom-up (e.g., shared morphological cues) processes. The
dissociation between these two theoretical alternatives has proved challenging. The
current effort set to tackle this challenge by harnessing two complementary
metatheoretical approaches to dimensional interaction: Garner’s logic of inferring
informational structure (Garner, 1974b) and General Recognition Theory – a
multidimensional extension of signal detection theory (GRT, Ashby & Townsend, 1986).
Conjoint application of these two rigorous methodologies afforded us to: (a) uncover the
internal representation that generate the angry-men-happy-women phenomenon, (b)
disentangle a variety of perceptual (bottom-up) and decisional (top-down) sources of
interaction, and (c) relate operational and theoretical meanings of dimensional
independence. The results show that the angry-men-happy-women bias is generated by
both perceptual and decisional biases. These outcomes document the involvement of both
bottom-up (e.g., shared morphological structures) and top-down (stereotypes) factors in
social perception.

人们通常会将愤怒情绪与男性面孔相绑定，而将快乐或惊讶情绪与女性面孔相关联。该男性愤怒-女性快乐偏见（angry-men-happy-women bias）被归因于自上而下（top-down）或自下而上（bottom-up）两类加工过程，前者例如后天习得的刻板印象，后者例如共有的形态线索。区分这两种理论假说一直是学界的研究难点。本研究旨在攻克这一难点，采用了两种互补的元理论维度交互分析范式：一是加纳（Garner, 1974b）提出的信息结构推断逻辑，二是通用识别理论（General Recognition Theory，GRT）——信号检测理论的多维扩展模型（Ashby & Townsend, 1986）。联合运用这两种严谨的研究方法，我们得以实现三大目标：(a) 揭示产生男性愤怒-女性快乐偏见现象的内在表征机制；(b) 拆解出交互作用的各类知觉（自下而上）与决策（自上而下）来源；(c) 厘清维度独立性在操作层面与理论层面的双重内涵。研究结果显示，男性愤怒-女性快乐偏见同时由知觉偏见与决策偏见共同促成。上述结果证实，社会知觉过程同时涉及自下而上（例如共有的形态结构）与自上而下（刻板印象）两类影响因素。