Spatial cognition
Do fearful faces make it harder to find your way?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Seeing fearful faces before retracing a route stopped men, but not women, from improving on their second trip through a virtual building, while angry faces had no effect.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — 3 emotion (neutral, fearful, angry faces) x 2 time (encoding, recall) within-subject design with gender as a between-subjects factor, run in a VR office building.
- N
- N=55 · 58 students recruited; 3 dropped out due to cybersickness, leaving 55 (24 male, 31 female).
- Population
- Italian university students aged 18-40
- Outcome
- Travel time and distance travelled to find a target object at encoding and recall
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Key findings
Everyone was faster and took shorter paths on the second trip, and men were generally faster than women at first. After fearful faces, however, men showed no improvement from first to second trip in either time or distance, and they were slower than women in that condition only. Women's performance was unaffected by any emotion, and angry faces did not differ from neutral ones for anyone.
Methodology
Students wore a VR headset and explored floors of a virtual office building to find a blue box, then did a face gender-categorisation task showing fearful, angry or neutral faces, and then had to find the same box again. Each person did this once for each emotion on a different floor, with order counterbalanced. Travel time and distance travelled were compared between the first (encoding) and second (recall) trip.
Limitations
The sample was small and no a priori power analysis was run, and the key finding rests on a three-way interaction with small effect sizes, so it needs replication. The study did not measure participants' own fear or anxiety, so explanations such as emotional contagion or taxed visuospatial working memory are speculation. Faces were static photos shown in a task where emotion was irrelevant, no positive emotion condition was included, and a virtual office may not capture real-world navigation.
How this study connects
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