Ranald D. Hansen

Finding the face in the crowd : An anger superiority effect

Facial gestures have been given an increasingly critical role in models of emotion. The biological significance of interindividual transmission of emotional signals is a pivotal assumption for placing the face in a central position in these models. This assumption invited a logical corollary, examined in this article: Face-processing should be highly efficient. Three experiments documented an asymmetry in the processing of emotionally discrepant faces embedded in crowds. The results suggested that threatening faces pop out of crowds, perhaps as a result of a preattentive, parallel search for signals of direct threat.

Constructing personality and social reality through music: Individual differences among fans of punk and heavy metal music

The study examined the relationship of popular music preferences to individual differences in social judgments and to personality characteristics. Individuals who expressed liking for heavy metal music were higher in machiavellianism and machismo and lower in need for cognition than nonfans. Heavy metal fans also made higher estimates than nonfans of consensus among young people for sexual, drug‐related, occult, and antisocial behaviors and attitudes. Punk rock fans were less accepting of authority than those who disliked this music. Punk fans also estimated higher frequencies than nonfans of antiauthority behaviors such as owning weapons, committing a crime, shoplifting, and going to jail. The results are discussed using interactive and social‐cognitive models for the acquisition of stable social attitudes and personality characteristics.

Schematic Information Processing of Heavy Metal Lyrics

Schematic processing of heavy metal lyrics was tested by comparing subjects in two cognitive load conditions. Subjects were either provided with the written lyrics (low cognitive load) or not (high cognitive load) as they listened to heavy metal songs with four common themes: sex, suicide, violence, and occult. Schematic processing was evidenced by the pattern of results across three experiments: Low cognitive load subjects showed better recall, song comprehension, and extraction of detailed content than did high cognitive load subjects, but both groups extracted very similar kinds of theme-relevant content. The pattern of effects argued that although heavy metal lyrics are not processed deeply under novice listening conditions, information processing at the schematic level does occur. Having the lyrics available allowed deeper information processing of the song lyrics at the time they were heard but did not substantially alter the kinds of content listeners extracted. Attitudinal and behavioral implications for schematic processing of heavy metal songs were discussed.

Probing “pop-out”: Another look at the face-in-the-crowd effect

C. H. Hansen and R. D. Hansen (1988) found that an angry face in a crowd of happy faces can be found faster than a happy face in a crowd of angry faces. They called this finding the face-in- the-crowd effect (FICE). The present experiments replicated this effect for nine-face crowds but not for four-face crowds. Hansen and Hansen concluded that their result was due to “pop out,” because they found no reliable effect of crowd size for angry face targets. Contrary to prediction from the “pop out” hypothesis, we found that the position of the target face within the crowd had an effect on reaction time. Such positional effects demonstrate that subjects were scanning the face array to locate the target face. Examination of the literature on the perception of facial expression suggests that the FICE may be produced, at least in part, by the crowds scanned rather than by the target scanned for. The present paper suggests that conclusive evidence of “pop-out” should consist of both the absence of target-position effects and the conventionally accepted small-stimulus-set-size effects.

Human Perception of Haptic Force Direction

In this paper we investigate the accuracy of human perception of haptic force direction applied to the hand. Haptic interfaces are commonly used in many applications and understanding the limitations of human perception would facilitate the design of these interfaces and the associated applications. The literature contains work related to force perception; however, none of which address the issue of the accuracy of haptic force direction perception. We discuss the design and implementation of the experiment used to evaluate the accuracy. Also presented are results related to training effects, fatigue and accuracy across angular regions

The Effects of Stereotype Consistency and Consensus Information on Predictions of Performance

Abstract The effects of gender stereotypes and consensus information on predictions of task performance were examined. We hypothesized that stereotype-consistent behavior would result in stronger predictions of future similar behavior than stereotype-inconsistent behavior would, and that consensus information would influence predictions only when behavior was stereotype-inconsistent. American undergraduates watched videotapes of female or male targets succeeding or failing at a task, followed by consensus information from a same-gender or other-gender consensus provider. The results indicated that stereotypes influenced predictions for males but not for females, whereas the reverse was true for consensus information. In particular, predictions of future success were higher for successful males than for successful females. Low consensus for success undermined predictions of future success for females but not for males.

Sympathetic arousal and self-attention: The accessibility of interoceptive and exteroceptive arousal cues ☆

Abstract Two experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses that sympathetic arousal has the capacity to instigate and maintain self-attention and that self-attention increases the accuracy of arousal appraisals. In both experiments residual sympathetic arousal following exercise predicted linguistic self-reference when attention had been forced to self during exeriise but not when attention during exercise had been distracted from self. In the second experiment, self reports of residual arousal were better predicted by actual residual arousal when subjects were self-attentive than when they were not. The results indicated that the relative accessibility of interoceptive and exteroceptive arousal cues mediated the capacity of sympathetic arousal to maintain self-attention and of self-attention to increase the accuracy of arousal appraisals. The results have implications for arousal-based theories of emotion and for models of excitation-transfer.

Time Pressure and Causal Attributions

Evidence was obtained which indicates that time pres sure was responsible for the conflicting results reported in two previously published attribution studies. The theoretical sig nificance of time pressure for causal attribution processes was discussed.