| Age, gender, and attractiveness play important roles in the ability to recognize faces. Yet, few studies have accounted for the relationships between these variables in contributing to emotional facial expression recognition. Study 1 examined the relationship between attractiveness and facial expression recognition and found no correlation, thus facial attractiveness was not included as a covariate in Study 2. Study 2 examined the role of both face age and face gender as well as participant age and participant gender in facial expression recognition accuracy scores. Negatively skewed results were found such that analysis of variance could not be used. Thus, logistic regression and t-tests were used to examine the relationships between these variables. Neither an own-age or an own-gender bias in facial expression recognition was supported in these findings. Findings show that participant age but not participant gender is a significant predictor of recognition accuracy where young participants demonstrated greater recognition accuracy than older participants. Additionally, young faces were recognized with greater accuracy than were older faces. In general, participant gender does not appear to significantly impact recognition accuracy, however, women were more accurate than men at recognizing the neutral faces of older individuals, suggesting that women may be better than men at detecting when emotion is not present in a face, as older faces were more difficult to recognize overall. Results suggest that it is important to consider both face age and face gender in face recognition, as the inclusion of the face gender provides a more complete picture than does face age alone. |
