Yesterday we tried to replicate the effect that John Eastwood, Daniel Smilek, and Philip Merikle observed — that negative facial expressions distract us from even the simplest tasks more than positive facial expressions. Hundreds of our readers watched one of two videos and were charged with counting the number of “upturned arcs” or “downturned arcs.” Here’s a sample video:
In this video, the “faces” formed by the arcs are smiling, but in the other video they were frowning. Both clips showed the identical number of upturned and downturned arcs — six. Yet we weren’t able to replicate Eastwood’s teams results. Here are our findings:
When respondents were asked to count upturned arcs, they did better with frowning faces — the opposite of what the original study found. When they counted downturned arcs, they did better with smiling faces, as expected, but overall, in our mini-study, there was no significant difference between counting accuracy for smiling faces and frowning faces.
Why the difference?
Well, even though Eastwood’s team had fewer participants, they each repeated the experiment 240 times, with the “faces” appearing in random different locations on the screen, and random variation in the number of arcs turned in each direction. This minimized biases that might have been introduced by a particular configuration of arcs, and overall, thousands of different sets of arcs were viewed — many more than in our replication.
Still think Eastman et al’s results are a fluke? Their study actually included a second experiment. This time, instead of counting arcs, viewers counted ovals, in displays like this:
The displays included positive (smiling), negative (frowning), and neutral expressions. As before, the researchers tracked time to count the shapes as well as counting accuracy. Here are the results:
Once again, reaction times were significantly slower and accuracy was lower for the frowning faces, compared both to the happy faces and the neutral faces. The researchers say this is clear evidence that negative facial expressions can distract us from even very basic counting tasks.
Eastwood, J.D., Smilek, D., Merikle, P.M. (2003). Negative facial expression captures attention and disrupts performance Perception & Psychophysics, 65 (3), 352-358