Due to mood-congruency effects, we expect the emotion perceived on a face to be biased towards one's own mood. But the findings in the scant literature on such mood effects in normal healthy populations have not consistently and adequately supported this expectation. Employing effective mood manipulation techniques that ensured that the intended mood was sustained throughout the perception task, we explored mood-congruent intensity and recognition accuracy biases in emotion perception. Using realistic face stimuli with expressive cues of happiness and sadness, we demonstrated that happy, neutral and ambiguous expressions were perceived more positively in the positive than in the negative mood. The mood-congruency effect decreased with the degree of perceived negativity in the expression. Also, males were more affected by the mood-congruency effect in intensity perception than females. We suggest that the greater salience and better processing of negative stimuli and the superior cognitive ability of females in emotion perception are responsible for these observations. We found no evidence for mood-congruency effect in the recognition accuracy of emotions and suggest with supporting evidence that past reports of this effect may be attributed to response bias driven by mood.

中文翻译：

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面部情绪感知的情绪一致性偏差及其性别依赖性

由于情绪一致性效应，我们预计面部感知的情绪会偏向于自己的情绪。但是，关于正常健康人群中这种情绪影响的文献很少，结果并没有一致和充分地支持这种预期。我们采用有效的情绪操纵技术来确保在整个感知任务中保持预期的情绪，我们探索了情绪感知中的情绪一致性强度和识别准确性偏差。使用带有快乐和悲伤表情线索的现实面部刺激，我们证明了快乐、中性和模棱两可的表情在积极情绪中比消极情绪中更积极。情绪一致性效应随着表达中感知到的消极程度而降低。还，与女性相比，男性在强度感知中更容易受到情绪一致性效应的影响。我们认为，女性对负面刺激的更大显着性和更好的处理能力以及女性在情绪感知方面的卓越认知能力是造成这些观察结果的原因。我们在情绪识别准确性方面没有发现情绪一致性效应的证据，并提出支持证据表明，过去关于这种效应的报告可能归因于情绪驱动的反应偏差。