Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Enhanced Memory For Fair-Related Faces And The Role Of Trait Anxiety, Gewnhi Park, Benjamin U. Marsh, Elisha J. Johnson

Faculty Publications

The current research examined whether fair consideration—a social norm that people inherently prefer to confirm—would modulate face recognition. Each neutral face was associated with fair or unfair offers via an economic decision task, the Ultimatum Game (UG) task. After the UG, participants were asked to identify the faces of proposers who made different offers. Enhanced memory was observed for fair-related compared to unfair-related faces. Furthermore, high trait anxiety was associated with reduced memory for fair-related faces. These results were further confirmed by signal detection theory. The current research provided initial evidence that people showed enhanced memory for faces that made …