Emotional facial expressions are remembered more negatively than they actually are: Robust negativity bias unaffected by affective acoustic context.

Do we remember people's faces more positively or negatively than they actually are? While the general negativity bias suggests that humans give more weight to negative over positive information, whether there is a bias to remember emotional faces more negatively than they are, and whether affective acoustic context can modulate these processes, remained unknown. We addressed these questions with a novel paradigm, in which morphed facial expressions ranging from negative (fearful) to positive (happy) were paired with acoustically rough and non-rough control contexts during the encoding phase. Following a distraction task, participants completed the retrieval phase, in which they identified the previously encoded facial expression from a full continuum of morphed faces. During retrieval, facial expressions were reported to be more negative than they actually were, as reflected by the in-depth analysis of signed errors calculated from incorrect retrievals. Importantly, this directional negativity bias persisted even for facial expressions that had been rated as neutral during encoding. None of these effects were significantly modulated by acoustic context. The negativity bias we report in long-term memory extends similar findings in the working memory literature and demonstrates the sensitivity of our novel task to various forms of negativity bias, highlighting its potential for investigating the cognitive mechanisms underlying memory for emotional facial expressions.