A Smile Worthy of Your Cognition: General Self-Efficacious Individuals Recognize and Remember Happy Faces

Self-efficacy, pertaining to individuals' belief in their capabilities, epitomizes resilience. Drawing from the literature on cognitive-emotional processing of facial expression, we hypothesized that self-efficacious individuals, propelled by their positive representations of others, will show a positive bias towards happy facial expressions. In Study 1 (N = 70), general self-efficacy was distinctly associated with the perception of happy expressions. In Study 2 (N = 92), general self-efficacy, but neither domain-specific self-efficacy nor self-esteem, predicted a bias toward recalling happy faces. Effects were obtained after controlling for depressive symptoms and negative self-evaluation (Studies 1 & 2) and neuroticism (Study 2). Findings illuminate the ways in which self-efficacious individuals create an adaptive social environment.