Maher Stephen, Ekstrom Tor, Chen Yue
Perception. 2014;43(12):1353-64. doi: 10.1068/p7806.
Perception of subtle facial expressions is essential for social functioning; yet it is unclear if human perceptual sensitivities differ in detecting varying types of facial emotions. Evidence diverges as to whether salient negative versus positive emotions (such as sadness versus happiness) are preferentially processed. Here, we measured perceptual thresholds for the detection of four types of emotion in faces--happiness, fear, anger, and sadness--using psychophysical methods. We also evaluated the association of the perceptual performances with facial morphological changes between neutral and respective emotion types. Human observers were highly sensitive to happiness compared with the other emotional expressions. Further, this heightened perceptual sensitivity to happy expressions can be attributed largely to the emotion-induced morphological change of a particular facial feature (end-lip raise).
对微妙面部表情的感知对于社交功能至关重要；然而，目前尚不清楚人类在检测不同类型的面部情绪时，其感知敏感度是否存在差异。关于显著的负面情绪与正面情绪（如悲伤与快乐）是否被优先处理，证据并不一致。在此，我们使用心理物理学方法测量了检测面部四种情绪（快乐、恐惧、愤怒和悲伤）的感知阈值。我们还评估了感知表现与中性表情和相应情绪表情之间面部形态变化的关联。与其他情绪表情相比，人类观察者对快乐表情高度敏感。此外，这种对快乐表情增强的感知敏感度在很大程度上可归因于特定面部特征（嘴角上扬）的情绪诱导形态变化。
