Iwasaki Miho, Noguchi Yasuki
Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Humanities, Kobe University, Japan.
Sci Rep. 2016 Feb 26;6:22049. doi: 10.1038/srep22049.
When we encounter someone we dislike, we may momentarily display a reflexive disgust expression, only to follow-up with a forced smile and greeting. Our daily lives are replete with a mixture of true and fake expressions. Nevertheless, are these fake expressions really effective at hiding our true emotions? Here we show that brief emotional changes in the eyes (micro-expressions, thought to reflect true emotions) can be successfully concealed by follow-up mouth movements (e.g. a smile). In the same manner as backward masking, mouth movements of a face inhibited conscious detection of all types of micro-expressions in that face, even when viewers paid full attention to the eye region. This masking works only in a backward direction, however, because no disrupting effect was observed when the mouth change preceded the eye change. These results provide scientific evidence for everyday behaviours like smiling to dissemble, and further clarify a major reason for the difficulty we face in discriminating genuine from fake emotional expressions.
当我们遇到不喜欢的人时，我们可能会瞬间露出反射性的厌恶表情，随后马上强颜欢笑并打招呼。我们的日常生活充斥着真假表情的混合。然而，这些假表情真的能有效隐藏我们的真实情绪吗？在这里我们表明，眼睛短暂的情绪变化（微表情，被认为能反映真实情绪）可以通过随后的嘴巴动作（如微笑）成功隐藏。与逆向掩蔽的方式相同，面部的嘴巴动作抑制了对该面部所有类型微表情的有意识察觉，即使观看者将全部注意力都集中在眼睛区域。然而，这种掩蔽仅在逆向时起作用，因为当嘴巴变化先于眼睛变化时，未观察到干扰效应。这些结果为诸如微笑以掩饰等日常行为提供了科学依据，并进一步阐明了我们在区分真实和虚假情绪表达时面临困难的一个主要原因。
