Universidad de La Laguna (Spain).
Span J Psychol. 2013;16:E53. doi: 10.1017/sjp.2013.68.
This study investigated how extrafoveally seen smiles influence the viewers' perception of non-happy eyes in a face. A smiling mouth appeared in composite faces with incongruent (angry, fearful, neutral, etc.) eyes, thus producing blended expressions, or they appeared in intact faces with genuine expressions. Overt attention to the eye region was spatially cued, foveal vision of the mouth was blocked by gaze-contingent masking, and the distance between the eyes and the mouth was varied. Participants evaluated whether the eyes were happy or not. Results indicated that the same non-happy eyes were more likely to be judged as happy, and more slowly to be judged as not happy, in presence more than in absence of a smile. As (a) the smiling mouth was highly salient regardless of type of eyes, (b) the influence on the eyes increased gradually as a function of eye-mouth proximity, and (c) the effect occurred in the absence of fixations on the mouth, we conclude that a salient smile radiates outwards to other face regions through a projection mechanism, thus making the eye expression look happy.
本研究探讨了眼外可见的微笑如何影响观看者对面部中非快乐眼睛的感知。在复合面孔中，微笑的嘴巴与不协调的（愤怒、恐惧、中性等）眼睛一起出现，从而产生混合表情，或者在具有真实表情的完整面孔中出现。对眼睛区域的显性关注通过空间线索进行引导，嘴巴的中央视觉被注视相关掩蔽所阻挡，眼睛和嘴巴之间的距离也有所变化。参与者评估眼睛是否快乐。结果表明，在存在微笑的情况下，相同的非快乐眼睛更有可能被判断为快乐，并且更不容易被判断为不快乐。由于（a）无论眼睛类型如何，微笑的嘴巴都非常突出，（b）随着眼睛和嘴巴之间的距离增加，对眼睛的影响逐渐增加，（c）即使没有注视嘴巴，效果也会发生，我们得出结论，一个突出的微笑通过投影机制向外辐射到其他面部区域，从而使眼睛表情看起来快乐。
