Transfer of “meaning” from masked facial expressions to arbitrary pictures equivalent to them

Abstract

There are experimental demonstrations that college students could not report verbally that threatening or friendly faces were presented when they appeared for a few milliseconds and were immediately replaced by a neutral face. This masked presentation of friendly or threatening faces can, however, evoke differential responses. The present study attempted to verify whether college students would form equivalence classes comprising masked faces and arbitrary pictures. Another aim was to examine the evaluations by the participants of the arbitrary pictures equivalent to masked faces, through a semantic differential. Twenty-seven participants, divided in two groups, learned conditional relations to generate two equivalence classes. One of the classes comprised a masked expressive face (angry for one group and happy for the other) masked by a neutral one, and three abstract pictures; the other class comprised the same neutral face and three other arbitrary pictures. Fourteen participants learned the trained relations and formed equivalence classes. They then evaluated, through the semantic differential, the arbitrary pictures equivalent to the expressive faces. All participants evaluated the same pictures; the group for which the pictures were equivalent to the happy face evaluated them positively and the group for which the pictures were equivalent to the angry face evaluated them negatively. These results confirm and extend previous findings showing that arbitrary pictures equivalent to expressive faces become symbols of the faces and areevaluated similarly to them in the semantic differential. This happens even when the expressive faces are masked.