Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Interdependent Mechanisms For Processing Gender And Emotion: The Special Status Of Angry Male Faces, Daniel Harris, Vivian Ciaramitaro

Honors College Theses

While some models of how various attributes of a face are processed have posited that face features, invariant physical cues such as gender or ethnicity as well as variant social cues such as emotion, may be processed independently (e.g., Bruce & Young, 1986), other models suggest a more distributed representation and interdependent processing (e.g., Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000). Here we use a contingent adaptation paradigm to investigate if mechanisms for processing the gender and emotion of a face are interdependent and symmetric across the happy-angry emotional continuum and regardless of the gender of the face. We simultaneously adapted participants …