Quantifying facial expression recognition across viewing conditions

Abstract

Facial expressions are key to social interactions and to assessment of potential danger in various situations. Therefore, our brains must be able to recognize facial expressions when they are transformed in biologically plausible ways. We used synthetic happy, sad, angry and fearful faces to determine the amount of geometric change required to recognize these emotions during brief presentations. Five-alternative forced choice conditions involving central viewing, peripheral viewing and inversion were used to study recognition among the four emotions. Two-alternative forced choice was used to study affect discrimination when spatial frequency information in the stimulus was modified. The results show an emotion and task-dependent pattern of detection. Facial expressions presented with low peak frequencies are much harder to discriminate from neutral than faces defined by either mid or high peak frequencies. Peripheral presentation of faces also makes recognition much more difficult, except for happy faces. Differences between fearful detection and recognition tasks are probably due to common confusions with sadness when recognizing fear from among other emotions. These findings further support the idea that these emotions are processed separately from each other.

I Know You are Beautiful Even without Looking at You: Discrimination of Facial Beauty in Peripheral Vision

“…The biological significance of beauty detection may be comparable to some wellstudied facial cues such as threatening and fearful expressions that are also known to be Detecting Facial Beauty in Periphery 9 detected rapidly at extrafovea (Goren and Wilson 2006;Leppanen and Nelson 2009).…”

Influence of intensity on children’s sensitivity to happy, sad, and fearful facial expressions

“…Limits on sensitivity to high spatial frequencies (i.e., fine detail) will make it harder for 5-year-olds to see the subtle differences in the shape of the mouth and eyes that distinguish neutral faces from expressive faces both in our experiment and in real-world interactions. Studies of adults indicate that discrimination of neutral faces from faces conveying happiness, sadness, or fear is optimal when high spatial frequencies are available (Goren & Wilson, 2006). High spatial frequencies are likely also important for discriminating between intensities of the same emotion and in recognizing which emotion is conveyed in low-intensity exemplars.…”

“…High spatial frequencies are likely also important for discriminating between intensities of the same emotion and in recognizing which emotion is conveyed in low-intensity exemplars. Indirect evidence for their role in correct identification is the dropoff in adults' accuracy when faces are moved to the periphery, where acuity and contrast sensitivity are known to be degraded (Goren & Wilson, 2006). Thus, limitations in acuity and contrast sensitivity may limit 5-year-olds' performance on our tasks and in real-world processing of facial expressions.…”

Attentional capture by irrelevant emotional distractor faces.

“…It is therefore possible that the pattern of effects found (interference for distractor singleton faces of negative expression but facilitation only for target faces with a positive expression) was due to an interaction with the face gender. For example, it is possible that the happy facial expressions were easy to detect, irrespective of the face gender, whereas the negative facial expressions were more difficult to decipher (e.g., Goren & Wilson, 2006) for male (always a target in the previous experiments) than for female (always a distractor) facial expressions of emotion. Indeed, there is some evidence for female superiority in displaying at least some facial expressions of emotion (e.g., Weiss et al, 2006).…”