威胁相关面孔表情对眼睛注视方向知觉的影响

The Effect of Threat-Related Facial Expressions on the Perception of Gaze Direction

本研究通过直立、倒置和模糊处理分离面孔结构信息和特征信息,探究威胁相关表情对直视知觉范围(the cone of direct gaze, CoDG)产生不同影响的原因。结果发现:愤怒和恐惧面孔在CoDG上的差异在直立和模糊条件存在,在倒置条件下消失,说明愤怒和恐惧表情对注视方向知觉的不同影响主要来自这两种威胁相关表情在结构信息加工上的差异,而非特征信息。

Although there are some explanations for the emotion effect on the perception of gaze direction,it is not clear whether the emotion effect results from the featural information or the configural information.In the current study,we conducted three behavioral experiments,adopting the Cone of Direct Gaze(CoDG)as the dependent variable,and used three types of facial pictures(upside,inverted,blur)to separate the effect of facial featural or configural information on the interaction between facial expressions and gaze direction.Three emotional expressions(angry,fearful,neutral)with eleven gaze directions were used in the current study.Participants were required to indicate the gaze direction of faces:looking forward,left or right.In Experiment 1,the main aim was to verify the reliability of the emotion effect on CoDG using upside artificial faces.The results showed that the CoDGs were wider for angry faces and neutral faces than fearful faces,and there was no difference between angry and neutral faces,which demonstrated that the difference of anger and fear on the perception of gaze directions was widely existing.Inverted faces were used as stimuli material in Experiment 2.Inversion was shown to hamper the configural information processing,while the featural information processing was impaired in a much lesser degree.Results showed that the CoDGs were narrower for angry and fearful faces than neutral faces,and the difference of CoDG between angry and fearful faces was not significant.This result indicated that the different effects of anger and fear on gaze perception mainly stemmed from the difference of the configural information rather than the featural information.In Experiment 3,blur faces were used to further verify the conclusion of Experiment 2.Blur faces largely disrupted featural information,but saved configural information.Results were consistent with Experiment 1,showing that the CoDGs of anger and neutral were wider than fear,and there was no difference between anger and neutral.These results were consistent with the prior assumption and further verified the findings of Experiment 2.Overall,these results have shown that(1)Anger and fear have different effects on the perception of gaze direction;2)The influence of different threatening facial expressions on eye gaze perception is not dependent on featural information,but on configural information.These findings further suggest that the interaction between emotion and gaze direction is mainly due to high-level emotional meaning instead of the lower-level feature.Our findings support the explanation of shared signal hypothesis and emotion appraisal hypothesis for the integration between emotion and gaze direction.