Comparing Recognition Memory of Faces with Positive/Negative Emotions

The effect of different facial emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, fear and anger…) on face recognition memory has been studied in different researches, but there is controversy in findings of these studies. Therefore, we conducted this study to evaluate the effect of facial emotions on face recognition memory. 45 normal adults (23 men) with normal memory aged between 18 and 35 years participated in this study. A computerized task using happy, neutral and sad faces was designed to evaluate the emotional face memory performance of participants. Data were extracted using the MATLAB (2015b) and then were imported to SPSS16.0. The repeated measure ANOVA was used to analyze the difference among the different facial emotions in terms of percentage of correct response, and correct/incorrect response times. There was a significant difference among the three expressed facial emotions with a significant decrease in recalling happy faces compared to sad and neutral ones (P It can be concluded that sad and neutral faces are recalled better than happy faces.