Effects of gender and luminance backgrounds on the recognition of neutral facial expressions

In this study we challenged the universal view of facial emotion perception evaluating the effects of gender and different luminance backgrounds on the recognition accuracy of neutral facial expressions. To this aim, we applied the Ekman standard paradigm for assessing the human ability to decode neutral facial expressions reproduced on black, white and grey backgrounds and portrayed by male and female actors. The exploited stimuli consisted of 10 different neutral faces (5 females) selected from the Dutch Radboud database (Langner et al. Cogn Emot, 2010 [21]) where luminance backgrounds were changed in black, grey and white. The resulted 30 stimuli were assessed by 31 subjects (16 females) who were asked to tag each of them with one of the six primary emotion labels. The data analysis demonstrates a significant gender effect where neutral male faces are less accurately decoded than females ones. On the other hand, no effects of luminance backgrounds have been identified.