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What determines facial emotional expression recognition? Lessons from the happy face advantage. 

Facial expressions are among the most salient social signals used to communicate our current emotional state – they indicate whether it is safe to approach or preferable to stay away. Hence it comes as little surprise that the manner in which facial expressions are processed has garnered considerable research interest. One question that has kept us busy is whether certain emotional expressions are processed preferentially – and what drives these processing differences. While most of the early work has focused on anger superiority our more recent work has exploited the ‘happy face advantage’, the observation that happy faces are recognised faster than angry (or sad, or fearful, or disgusted) ones in simple expression recognition tasks. We have used this phenomenon to assess the effects of social category cues, person knowledge, and contextual cues on facial emotional expression recognition.

Professor Ottmar V. Lipp, Queensland University of Technology

After completing my PhD at the University of Giessen, Germany, I joined the School of Psychology, University of Queensland as a post-doctoral researcher and member of academic staff. In 2014, I joined Curtin University as a Research Professor in the School of Psychology. I returned to Brisbane to take up a Research Professorship in the School of Psychology and Counselling at QUT in 2020. My teaching is in the areas of Human Associative Learning, Psychophysiology, and Affective Neuroscience. My research addresses questions related to emotional learning (how do we acquire, maintain, and reduce emotional responses such as likes, dislikes or fear and anxiety) and the manner in which we process facial expressions of emotion.