Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley.
Emotion. 2022 Sep;22(6):1185-1192. doi: 10.1037/emo0000934. Epub 2020 Dec 28.
The ability to recognize others' emotions is critical for social interactions. It is widely assumed that recognizing facial expressions predominantly determines perceived categorical emotion, and contextual information only coarsely modulates or disambiguates interpreted faces. Using a novel method, inferential emotion tracking, we isolated and quantified the contribution of visual context versus face and body information in dynamic emotion recognition. Even when faces and bodies were blurred out in muted videos, observers inferred the emotion of invisible characters accurately and in high agreement based solely on visual context. Our results further show that the presence of visual context can override interpreted emotion categories from face and body information. Strikingly, we find that visual context determines perceived emotion nearly as much and as often as face and body information does. Visual context is an essential and indispensable element of emotion recognition: Without context, observers can misperceive a person's emotion over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
识别他人情绪的能力对于社交互动至关重要。人们普遍认为，识别面部表情主要决定了感知到的类别情绪，而上下文信息只是粗略地调节或消除解释的面部表情。使用一种新的方法，推断性情绪跟踪，我们分离并量化了视觉背景与面部和身体信息在动态情绪识别中的贡献。即使在静音视频中模糊了面部和身体，观察者也仅基于视觉背景准确地推断出不可见角色的情绪，并高度一致。我们的研究结果进一步表明，视觉背景的存在可以覆盖从面部和身体信息推断出的情绪类别。引人注目的是，我们发现视觉背景几乎和面部及身体信息一样决定了感知到的情绪，而且频率也一样高。视觉背景是情绪识别的一个必不可少的要素：如果没有背景，观察者可能会随着时间的推移错误地感知一个人的情绪。
