Politicians, put on your poker face: voting attenuates the leftward posing bias

Abstract

The posing bias is a phenomenon based on the asymmetrical expression of emotion in the face, where the left cheek is perceived as more emotional from being controlled by the emotion dominant right hemisphere, in turn making the right cheek appear serious (Lindell, 2013). These subtle differences in emotional expression may be important in occupations like politics, where promotional materials are central in campaigning. Using leftward and rightward posed image pairs in a forced-choice paradigm, this study examined biases for lateral poses in two conditions: when participants were asked 1) which image looks more friendly, and 2) which image you would rather vote for. It was hypothesized that the leftward posing bias would be replicated in the emotion condition. And further, in the voting condition, that a difference would emerge in voting selection due to participants’ self-identified political orientations, where the opposing orientations would prefer the emotional qualities that stereotypically align with their ideology. The leftward posing bias approached significance when selecting the emotional image and became significant when male participants were removed, denoting the female advantage in emotional recognition (Thompson & Voyer, 2014). No significant differences emerged between self-identified left or right-wing participants, largely because of a small number of right-wing participants that made comparisons difficult. The leftward/emotional trend in the emotion condition and the rightward/serious trend in the voting condition were significantly different from each other when compared with a paired samples t-test, suggesting that context of the task may bias lateral pose selection.