The Eyebrow Frown

A Salient Social Signal

Tipples, Jason
Atkinson, Anthony P.
Young, Andrew W.

¹Department of Psychology, The University of Hull, Hull, England
²Department of Psychology, King Alfred's College, Winchester, England
³Department of Psychology, University of York, York, England.

⁴Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jason Tipples, Department of Psychology, The University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, England. E-mail: [email protected].

This research was supported by a grant from the Medical Research Council to Jason Tipples and Andrew W. Young, and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship to Anthony P. Atkinson. We thank Linda Kendall-Scott and Natalie Stark, King Alfred's College, Winchester, England, for helping with some pilot studies.

Received Date: June 21, 2001; Revised Date: February 14, 2002; Accepted Date: February 16, 2002

Emotion 2(3):p 288-296, September 2002.

Seven experiments investigated the finding that threatening schematic faces are detected more quickly than nonthreatening faces. Threatening faces with ∨-shaped eyebrows (angry and scheming expressions) were detected more quickly than nonthreatening faces with ∧-shaped eyebrows (happy and sad expressions). In contrast to the hypothesis that these effects were due to perceptual features unrelated to the face, no advantage was found for ∨-shaped eyebrows presented in a nonfacelike object. Furthermore, the addition of internal facial features (the eyes, or the nose and mouth) was necessary to produce the detection advantage for faces with ∨-shaped eyebrows. Overall, the results are interpreted as showing that the ∨-shaped eyebrow configuration affords easy detection, but only when other internal facial features are present.