情境对面孔表情识别的影响

The Effect of Emotional Context on Facial Emotion Perception

长期以来,关于面孔表情识别的研究主要是围绕着面孔本身的结构特征来进行的,但是近年来的研究发现,面孔表情的识别也会受到其所在的情境背景(如语言文字、身体背景、自然与社会场景等)的影响,特别是在识别表情相似的面孔时,情境对面孔表情识别的影响更大。本文首先介绍和分析了近几年关于语言文字、身体动作、自然场景和社会场景等情境影响个体对面孔表情的识别的有关研究;其次,分析了文化背景、年龄以及焦虑程度等因素对面孔表情识别情境效应的影响;最后,强调了未来的研究应重视研究儿童被试群体、拓展情绪的类别、关注真实生活中的面孔情绪感知等。

The basic expressions view claims that there are basic facial expressions of emotions that are created by specific configurations of facial muscles. However, we often find that contexts play an important role in facial emotion perception in daily life. Moreover, a series of studies have shown that contexts often unconsciously influence emotion perception, but some studies have provided contradictory findings. In this paper, we provide a framework of how different types of contexts affect facial perception. Words, body language, visual ques, and even voices shape how emotion is perceived in a face. Prior contradictory findings arise, in part, because of the lack of consideration of the perceptual similarity among facial expressions. The greater the perceptual similarity between the target face and the context-associated face, the easier it is to perceive the context emotion in the target face. On the other hand, words constitute a clear example of a perceiver-based context because they provide a top-down constraint in emotion perception, contributing information over and above the affective meaning available in structural information of a face. Besides, the evidence from eye movements when participants were scanning expressive faces embedded in differing contexts showed that the information provided by the facial expression was combined with the context during the early stages of processing, and to some degree, was automatic. In addition, the context effect is sensitive to cultural, age, and gender differences. Cultural context appears to influence how perceivers sample information from a face in a manner that is similar to the influence of situational context. And, more importantly, some findings suggest that cultural differences in interpreting others＇ emotions depend on the perceptual integration processes that decline with age, leading to fewer cultural differences in perception among older adults than among younger ones. Furthermore, stress also influences the background integration. A series of studies have shown that participants who were more stressed showed less of an influence of the background context on their ratings of the central face. We also point out that future investigations should examine the developmental timeline of the face-context integration by focusing on children. And more emotions should be added to create diverse combinations of facial expressions and contexts, and we can also promote validity of experimental result by adopting more natural and realistic examples.