Orienting to face expression during encoding improves men's recognition of own gender faces Erika K. Fulton, Megan Bulluck, Christopher Hertzog ⁎ School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, 654 Cherry St., Atlanta, GA 30332-0170, United States abstract article info Article history: Received 10 September 2014 Received in revised form 3 August 2015 Accepted 11 August 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: Gender differences Episodic memory Face recognition Face processing Emotion expression It is unclear why women have superior episodic memory of faces, but the benefit may be partially the result of women engaging in superior processing of facial expressions. Therefore, we hypothesized that orienting instruc- tions to attend to facial expression at encoding would significantly improve men's memory of faces and possibly reduce gender differences. We directed 203 college students (122 women) to study 120 faces under instructions to orient to either the person's gender or their emotional expression. They later took a recognition test of these faces by either judging whether they had previously studied the same person or that person with the exact same expression; the latter test evaluated recollection of specific facial details. Orienting to facial expressions dur- ing encoding significantly improved men's recognition of own-gender faces and eliminated the advantage that women had for male faces under gender orienting instructions. Although gender differences in spontaneous strategy use when orienting to faces cannot fully account for gender differences in face recognition, orienting men to facial expression during encoding is one way to significantly improve their episodic memory for male faces. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Successful human social interaction depends on accurate face recog- nition. For instance, faces serve as retrieval cues for qualities of an indi- vidual that are relevant to social exchange (Nachson, 1995; Riggio, 1992). However, there are individual differences in face recognition speed and accuracy (Guillem & Mograss, 2005; Hall, Hutton, & Morgan, 2010; Herlitz & Rehnman, 2008; Herlitz & Yonker, 2002; Hofmann, Suvak, & Litz, 2006; Lewin & Herlitz, 2002; Lewin, Wolgers, & Herlitz, 2001; McBain, Norton, & Chen, 2009; Rehnman & Herlitz, 2007; Vuilleumier, George, Lister, Armony, & Driver, 2005), some of which have relatively serious consequences. Impaired episodic memory of faces is seen in disorders such as schizophrenia (Calkins, Gur, Ragland, & Gur, 2005; Silver et al., 2006), autism (Weigelt, Koldewyn, & Kanwisher, 2012), and prosopagnosia (Kress & Daum, 2003), and is part of a general episodic memory disorder in Alzheimer's disease (Hawley & Cherry, 2004; Plaza, López-Crespo, Antúnez, Fuentes, & Estévez, 2012). Understanding the factors that lead to superior face rec- ognition could support the development of training and treatments to improve face recognition in these and other populations. It could even inform the development of software that could emulate human facial recognition, which has multiple applications (e.g., Hu, Klare, Bonnen, & Jain, 2013; Konen, 1996). One way to understand the factors that lead to superior facial recog- nition is to examine gender differences therein, which are commonly found (Bengner et al., 2006; Guillem & Mograss, 2005; Herlitz & Rehnman, 2008; Lewin & Herlitz, 2002; Megreya, Bindemann, & Havard, 2011; Rehnman & Herlitz, 2007; Yonker, Eriksson, Nilsson, & Herlitz, 2003). A recent meta-analysis by Herlitz and Lovén (2013) re- ported that women are better at recognizing faces (Hedges' g = .36), with the advantage seen primarily for female faces. Several explanations have been offered for women's advantage, such as their superior face perception (Megreya et al., 2011), greater self-reported social engage- ment (Sommer, Hildebrandt, Kunina-Habenicht, Schacht, & Wilhelm, 2013), increased encoding specificity of faces (Guillem & Mograss, 2005; Lovén, Herlitz, & Rehnman, 2011), and superior recognition or de- tection of facial expression (Hall et al., 2010). Women's face recognition may also benefit from better use of increased encoding time (McKelvie, 1981), higher circulating estradiol (Yonker et al., 2003) and own-gender faces (Herlitz & Lovén, 2013; Lewin & Herlitz, 2002; Lovén, Svärd, Ebner, Herlitz, & Fischer, 2014; Lovén et al., 2011; McKelvie, 1981; Megreya et al., 2011; Wolff, Kemter, Schweinberger, & Wiese, 2014; Wright & Sladden, 2003). Although a complicated interplay of biological and so- cial factors likely accounts for gender differences in face recognition, much of the existing research suggests that women excel at face Acta Psychologica 161 (2015) 18–24 ⁎ Corresponding author at: School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0170, United States. E-mail addresses: efulton3@gatech.edu (E.K. Fulton), megan.bulluck@gmail.com (M. Bulluck), christopher.hertzog@psych.gatech.edu (C. Hertzog). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2015.08.005 0001-6918/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Acta Psychologica journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/ locate/actpsy