To examine whether there were any correlations between the magnitude of the angry face effect and brain activity levels, we used the mean behavioural dprime score across all face loads for each emotional expression condition to calculate difference scores for angry minus happy and angry minus neutral face contrasts (based on the angry face advantage observed in the behavioural results).
They all report exogenous attention biases toward emotional symbols, an "angry face advantage" being reported.
Namely, on the one hand, some behavioral and electrophysiological studies have shown a so called happy face advantage (e.g. [ 16, 18- 20], that is, faster responses to happy expression relative to negative expressions.
This pattern of self-face advantage persisted in European Americans during the low-threat condition, while Chinese participants regained self-face advantage during the low-threat condition.
In addition, these findings are in accordance with Ma & Han's (2010) implicit positive association (IPA) theory of self-face advantage.
We found that European Americans, unlike Chinese participants, did not show a "boss effect" and maintained the self-face advantage even in the presence of their supervisor's face.
However, in Chinese participants, this self-face advantage is lost in the presence of one's supervisor, and they respond faster to their supervisor's face than to their own.
This is in stark contrast to Chinese participants, all of who showed a loss of self-face advantage during high-threat blocks, regardless of the boss's social status.
Here, we showed that Americans do not demonstrate a loss of self-face advantage in the presence of the boss, suggesting that the boss does not constitute a threat to oneself for American participants, while it does for Chinese participants, who did lose the self-face advantage in the presence of the boss.
In one of their experiments, they demonstrated that both Americans and Chinese participants showed an elimination of the self-face advantage after negative threat-to-self-concept priming, although Americans did not demonstrate as great a decrease in self-face advantage as Chinese participants, suggesting that Americans were more robust to threats to self [18].
Instead, European American participants had faster RTs to their own face in both low-threat (self and faculty member) and high-threat (self and advisor) conditions, maintaining the self-face advantage regardless of social context.
