Date of Award
Summer 8-23-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in Psychology
Organizational Unit
College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology
First Advisor
Timothy D. Sweeny
Second Advisor
Kimberly Chiew
Third Advisor
Peter Sokol-Hessner
Fourth Advisor
Haluk Öğmen
Copyright Statement / License for Reuse
All Rights Reserved.
Keywords
Attention, Capacity limits, Ensemble coding, Happy superiority effects (HSE), Perception, Visual search
Abstract
The “happy-superiority effect” (HSE) – the finding that happy faces are found more quickly than other expressions in visual search – is a robust but theoretically ambiguous phenomenon. It is unclear whether this advantage stems from a genuine attentional priority for positive emotions or from low-level perceptual artifacts that make a smile a more salient visual signal. This dissertation employed a programmatic series of four studies to disentangle these factors, culminating in a novel paradigm that first measured individual perceptual biases in judging emotional faces and then used these measurements to experimentally equate the perceptual salience of happy and sad targets in a visual search task. The results revealed a multi-component basis for the HSE. First, I established a robust perceptual asymmetry: the tendency to average faces in a neutral crowd disproportionately affected sad faces and neutral distractor faces were systematically perceived as being more similar to sad faces than to happy faces, providing happy targets with a baseline advantage in visual distinctiveness. Second, gaze data revealed an attentional efficiency advantage, with happy faces eliciting shorter fixation durations than sad faces, indicative of efficient processing once found. Most critically, even after experimentally controlling for initial perceptual salience in the final study, a significant HSE persisted. Taken together, these findings challenge any single-mechanism account. I conclude that the happy-face advantage is best explained by convergence of efficiencies across perceptual and attentional stages. This work advances our understanding of models of emotional attention by showing that the efficiency of visual search depends not just on what an object is, but on how it is initially perceived.
Copyright Date
8-2025
Publication Statement
Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
Rights Holder
Görkem Er
Provenance
Received from ProQuest
File Format
application/pdf
Language
English (eng)
Extent
154 pgs
File Size
6.2 MB
Recommended Citation
Er, Görkem, "Biased Perceptions of Emotion and Crowds in the Context of Visual Search" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2632.
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/2632
Included in
Cognitive Psychology Commons, Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons, Neurosciences Commons