Date of Award

Summer 8-22-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D. in Psychology

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology

First Advisor

Timothy Sweeny

Second Advisor

Michelle Rozenman

Third Advisor

Kateri McRae

Fourth Advisor

Kimberly Chiew

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Keywords

Bias, Perception, Attention allocation, Categorization bias

Abstract

Visual representations are often biased, and these biases can manifest across many different stages of perception. For example, when categorizing nuanced, ambiguous, or fleeting emotional expressions, most perceivers are biased to interpret expressions as negative. Biases also manifest at the level of attention-allocation as observers dynamically examine and attend to expressions as they visually navigate a crowd. To comprehensively understand biased emotion perception, it remains critical to understand how bias manifests across the process of making emotional judgements, both as observers gather information about faces over time and as they make a final categorization of what they see. Biased patterns of attention allocation while viewing emotional faces and biased categorization are separate processes, but evidence suggests they may interact and influence one another to ultimately guide behavior. In my first study, perceivers completed two tasks—a categorization bias task where they evaluated the emotion of briefly presented emotional crowds and a free-viewing task where they examined crowds varying in emotional expressions and expression intensity over several seconds. These tasks were repeated in my second study with dynamic stimuli where expressions subtly changed across the course of a trial. Across two studies, I replicated and extended prior findings that perceivers are biased to categorize faces as angry for both static and dynamically changing expressions, especially when viewing subtle emotional expressions. First and second fixations were also biased toward low-intensity dynamic expressions, suggesting that observers orient first to ambiguity to resolve their own uncertainty. These separate forms of bias were not related to each other or to symptoms of anxiety. This work suggests that categorization bias is not influenced by biased patterns of attention-allocation, and further that these separate forms of bias may arise from different underlying mechanisms.

Copyright Date

8-2026

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Delaney McDonagh

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

99 pgs

File Size

2.7 MB

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