自然场景与身体动作对面孔表情识别的影响

The effect of emotional scene and body expression on facial expression recognition

本研究以消极情绪间感知相似性较低的厌恶、恐惧面孔表情为材料,提供5个情绪性语言标签减少文字背景对面孔识别的促进作用,通过2个实验对自然场景以及身体动作对面孔表情识别的影响进行了研究,旨在考察面孔表情与自然场景间的情绪一致性对情绪面孔识别和自然场景加工的影响,以及加入与自然场景情绪相冲突的身体动作对面孔表情识别可能产生的影响。研究结果表明:(1)尽管增加了情绪性语言标签选项数量,自然场景的情绪对面孔表情识别的影响依旧显著;(2)当面孔表情与自然场景情绪不一致时,面孔识别需要更多依赖对自然场景的加工,因此对自然场景的加工程度更高;(3)身体动作会在一定程度上干扰自然场景对面孔表情识别的影响,但自然场景依然对情绪面孔的表情识别有重要作用。

Traditionally, the recognition of facial expression was studied by using isolated faces, which was affected by the categorical theory of emotion. In fact, in real life, facial expression always occurs in context. The result of facial expression recognition could be ambiguous when observer typically viewed face in isolation without any other cues. Recently many researches investigated how context may influence the facial expression processing. Numerous studies found context effect in recognition of facial expression, namely visual scene, body expression, emotional concept and surrounding other faces all shaped the facial expression processing. Evidence from ERPs and eye movements showed that facial expression was combined with both of emotional visual scene and body expression during the early stage of processing, and to some degree, was automatic. But none of these studies investigated the role they played simultaneously. Moreover, studies of context effect in recognition of facial expression seldom investigated the recognition of visual scene directly by using memory paradigm. Given that emotional concept may provide a top-down constraint in facial expression recognition, in the current study, we increased number of emotion labels for a better understanding of the context effect. Two experiments were conducted in this study, both of them adopted a 2（facial expression： disgust, fear）×2（emotion congruent between face and context： congruent, incongruent） within-subject design. Stimuli were made up by images of disgust and fear（low level of perceptual similarity） facial expression, visual scene and body expression. All participants were required to label an emotion word for the face which was shown against backgrounds of visual scene（Exp1） or both visual scene and body expression（Exp2）. Experiment 1 aimed to study the effect of emotion congruent between facial expression and visual scene on facial expression recognition. On the basis of experiment 1, experiment 2 added congruent or incongruent body expression toinvestigate whether body expression disturbed the effect of visual scene on facial expression recognition. Results of the two experiments indicate that：（1）The influence of visual scene on facial expression recognition is still significant when increased the number of emotion labels;（2）Participants would rely more on visual scene and remember the scene more often when emotional facial expression is shown against an incongruent visual scene;（3）The effect of visual scene on facial expression recognition can be influenced by body expression, but the emotion of visual scene still play an important role in recognition of negative facial expression