The influence of facial blushing and paling on emotion perception and memory

Emotion expressions facilitate interpersonal communication by conveying information about a person’s affective state. The current work investigates how facial coloration (i.e., subtle changes in chromaticity from baseline facial color) impacts the perception of, and memory for, emotion expressions, and whether these depend on dynamic (vs. static) representations of emotional behavior. Emotion expressive stimuli that either did or did not vary in facial coloration were shown to participants who were asked to categorize and rate the stimuli’s intensity (Exps. 1 & 2), as well as recall their degree of facial coloration (Exps. 3 & 4). Results showed that changes in facial coloration facilitated emotion categorization accuracy in dynamic (Exp. 1) but not static expressions (Exp. 2). Facial coloration further increased perceived emotion intensity, with participants misremembering the coloration of both dynamic and static expressions differently depending on emotion category prototype (Exps. 3 & 4). Together, these findings indicate that facial coloration conveys affective information to observers and contributes to biases in how emotion expressions are perceived and remembered.