Jedsada Thavornfung
University of Texas at Austin
PSY 458 Experimental Psychology
Supervisor: Dr. David Gilden
Program: PsychoPy
The study was conducted in Spring 2022
Humans are social species where we meet new people every day in daily basis: making new friends from class or workplace. Memorizing people faces had become significantly important to both short- and long-term relationship because people would want to associate more with someone who were able to recognize their faces. Remembering or recognizing people faces could illustrate how well you as a person pay attention to other people, which could improve the social interaction skills. This research investigated if certain facial expression and gender of a person influence false memory and memorizing stranger faces. The purpose of this research is to identify if facial expression and gender of a person influence the false memory or how well a person can correctly recognize stranger faces. Participants took the experiment on the computer via PsychoPy. First, six images of people with either happy or sad facial expression were shown for participants to memorize. Second, once the images have been shown, the same people with both facial expressions will be shown to participants (twelve images). Then, participants will be asked to identify which images have the same expression as the images that being shown in the first step. Participants repeated both steps for six time (72 images in total). The result suggests that both male and female participants illustrated same-sex bias when the images have happy facial expression. Meanwhile, both male and female participants illustrated opposite-sex bias only when the images have sad facial expression. Thus, facial expression has an influence on false memory and facial recognition in humans depending on the sex or genders of strangers.