The effects of happy and angry expressions on identity and expression memory for unfamiliar faces

We investigated the influence of happy and angry expressions on memory for new faces. Participants were presented with happy and angry faces in an intentional or incidental learning condition and were later asked to recognise the same faces displaying a neutral expression. They also had to remember what the initial expressions of the faces had been. Remember/know/guess judgements were made both for identity and expression memory. Results showed that faces were better recognised when presented with a happy rather than an angry expression, but only when learning was intentional. This was mainly due to an increase of the I remember" responses for happy faces when encoding was intentional rather than incidental. In contrast, memory for emotional expressions was not different for happy and angry faces whatever the encoding conditions. We interpret these findings according to the social meaning of emotional expressions for the self.