Bould Emma, Morris Neil
Psychology Department, Lancaster University, UK.
Br J Psychol. 2008 May;99(Pt 2):167-89. doi: 10.1348/000712607X206702. Epub 2007 May 4.
Three studies investigated the importance of movement for the recognition of subtle and intense expressions of emotion. In the first experiment, 36 facial emotion displays were duplicated in three conditions either upright or inverted in orientation. A dynamic condition addressed the perception of motion by using four still frames run together to encapsulate a moving sequence to show the expression emerging from neutral to the subtle emotion. The multi-static condition contained the same four still presented in succession, but with a visual noise mask (200 ms) between each frame to disrupt the apparent motion, whilst in the single-static condition, only the last still image (subtle expression) was presented. Results showed a significant advantage for the dynamic condition, over the single- and multi-static conditions, suggesting that motion signals provide a more accurate and robust mental representation of the expression. A second experiment demonstrated that the advantage of movement was reduced with expressions of a higher intensity, and the results of the third experiment showed that the advantage for the dynamic condition for recognizing subtle emotions was due to the motion signal rather than additional static information contained in the sequence. It is concluded that motion signals associated with the emergence of facial expressions can be a useful cue in the recognition process, especially when the expressions are subtle.
三项研究探讨了运动对于识别微妙和强烈情绪表达的重要性。在第一个实验中，36种面部情绪展示在三种条件下被复制，展示方向要么是正立的，要么是倒立的。动态条件通过一起运行四个静止帧来解决运动感知问题，以封装一个运动序列，展示表情从无表情到微妙情绪的变化过程。多静态条件包含依次呈现的相同四个静止帧，但在每个帧之间有一个视觉噪声掩码（200毫秒）以干扰明显的运动，而在单静态条件下，只呈现最后一个静止图像（微妙表情）。结果显示，与单静态和多静态条件相比，动态条件具有显著优势，这表明运动信号为表情提供了更准确和稳健的心理表征。第二个实验表明，随着表情强度的增加，运动的优势会降低，第三个实验的结果表明，动态条件在识别微妙情绪方面的优势是由于运动信号，而不是序列中包含的额外静态信息。研究得出结论，与面部表情出现相关的运动信号在识别过程中可能是一个有用的线索，尤其是当表情很微妙时。
