Study of cognitive tendencies in recognizing negative emotional faces

Objective To study the cognitive tendencies in recognizing negative emotional faces.Methods The experiment used the traditional flanker paradigm for reference.Forty-eight university students (19 males,29 females) finished the flanker tasks deigned by E-Prime, and their accuracy rate and reaction time were recorded in the study.Results ANOVA revealed that,in all cases,the accuracy rate of anger was significant higher than fear and sadness (96.60% ,94.50% ,94.40% ) (P＜0.05).And when the flanking stimuli were fear faces or there were no flanking stimuli, the reaction time of anger was much shorter than fear and sadness ( respectively,fear(801.27 ± 140.99) ms,anger(723.94 ± 151.37 ) ms, sadness(812.21 ± 148.85 ) ms; fear(788.17 ±148.81 ) ms, anger ( 694.28 ± 111.99 ) ms, sadness (763.57 ± 133.91 ) ms, P ＜ 0.05 ).When the flanking stimuli were anger or sadness faces, the reaction time of anger was significant shorter than fear( respectively, fear( 824.09 ± 164.42) ms, anger (721.48 ± 124.06 ) ms, sadness ( 760.50 ± 131.12 ) ms; fear ( 798.95 ± 146.40) ms, anger (702.55 ± 136.07 ) ms, sadness (750.48 ± 133.86) ms, P ＜ 0.05).Conclusion There are no flanker effects in recognizing different negative emotional faces, but there are anger superiority effects of face recognition and cognitive tendencies, which is helpful for clinical diagnosis and treatment of some diseases associated with emotional disorders. Key words: Facial recognition;  Fear;  Anger;  Sadness;  Cognitive tendencies