Motion Increases Recognition of Naturalistic Postures but not Facial Expressions

Abstract

Although emotion expressions are typically dynamic and include the whole person, much emotion recognition research uses static, posed facial expressions. In this study, we created a stimulus set of dynamic, naturalistic expressions drawn from professional tennis matches to determine whether movement would result in better recognition. We examined participants' judgments of static versus dynamic expressions when viewing an isolated face, an isolated body, or a whole person. Dynamic expressions increased recognition of whether the player had won or lost the point. In addition, recognition improved when the whole person was presented as opposed to only the face or body. However, overall recognition of wins and losses was poor, with recognition for isolated faces being poorer than chance for winning players. Our findings highlight the importance of incorporating dynamic stimuli and support previous research showing that recognition of naturalistic expressions differs greatly from the commonly-used posed and isolated facial expressions of emotion. Using a wider range of naturalistic stimuli should be incorporated into future research to better understand how emotion recognition functions in daily life.

“Eye can’t see the difference”: Facial Expressions of Pain, Pleasure, and Fear Are Consistently Rated Due to Chance

“…This approach is not possible in our case for two reasons: (a) because our hypothesis postulates that the two expressions that are of highest interest to us (pain and pleasure) are indistinguishable, asking pre-test raters to distinguish these would not be sensible, and (b) using stimuli labeled during pre-test as pleasure or pain would inherently lead to testing whether participants agree on representations of pain and pleasure (that is to say, whether there is a common mental representation as discussed by Chen et al, 2018). The ecological validity of such a result would be extremely limited and has been criticized in a recent publication (Van Der Zant & Nelson, 2021). Instead, we followed the methodology of one of the pioneering articles on the topic (Aviezer et al, 2012).…”

"Wow!" and "Aah": Bimodal Stimuli of Affective States with High and Low Intensity Displays

“…That is to say, whether there is a common mental representation as discussed by Chen [38]. The ethological validity of such a result would be extremely limited and has recently been criticized [12,17,18].…”

“…It should be pointed out that the stimuli used in the last two aforementioned studies are seminaturalistic and were not produced in a laboratory since the laboratory approach was highly criticized for its low ecological validity [12,17,18]. The used stimuli also were not pre-tested (a step that is often used by researchers to evaluate the stimuli being in concordance with the mental representation of the population).…”

The effects of spatial frequency on the decoding of emotional facial expressions.

“…For instance, research that suggests somatic signals are important for transmitting emotional content (Aviezer et al, 2012), and context is crucial for understanding emotional states (Barrett et al, 2011;Carroll & Russell, 1996; see also Zebrowitz & Montepare, 2008). Future research should include dynamic and naturalistic emotion stimuli (e.g., Van Der Zant & Nelson, 2021) to better understand the types of information that scaffold accurate emotion identification. Additionally, we used forward-facing emotional expressions, but differences in intensity of facial expression, gaze, DECODING EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIONS 13 and head turn may also influence accuracy of emotional expression categorization and have led our stimuli to be more ambiguous emotional cues than are typically encountered.…”