Abstract
Emotional facial expressions are immediate indicators of the affective dispositions of others. Recently it has been shown that early stages of social perception can already be influenced by (implicit) attributions made by the observer about the agent’s mental state and intentions. In the current study possible mechanisms underpinning distortions in the perception of dynamic, ecologically-valid, facial expressions were explored. In four experiments we examined to what extent basic perceptual processes such as contrast/context effects, adaptation and representational momentum underpinned the perceptual distortions, and to what extent ‘emotional anticipation’, i.e. the involuntary anticipation of the other’s emotional state of mind on the basis of the immediate perceptual history, might have played a role. Neutral facial expressions displayed at the end of short video-clips, in which an initial facial expression of joy or anger gradually morphed into a neutral expression, were misjudged as being slightly angry or slightly happy, respectively (Experiment 1). This response bias disappeared when the actor’s identity changed in the final neutral expression (Experiment 2). Videos depicting neutral-to-joy-to-neutral and neutral-to-anger-to-neutral sequences again produced biases but in opposite direction (Experiment 3). The bias survived insertion of a 400 ms blank (Experiment 4). These results suggested that the perceptual distortions were not caused by any of the low-level perceptual mechanisms (adaptation, representational momentum and contrast effects). We speculate that especially when presented with dynamic, facial expressions, perceptual distortions occur that reflect ‘emotional anticipation’ (a low-level mindreading mechanism), which overrules low-level visual mechanisms. Underpinning neural mechanisms are discussed in relation to the current debate on action and emotion understanding.
Highlights
It is virtually impossible to look at an expression displayed on a human face and not get an immediate impression of the individual’s emotional state of mind
Recent theories of the embodiment of others’ facial expressions [6,7,8,9,10] have suggested that there might be an influence which works in the other way: the perceptual categorization process could be induced by the involuntary ‘experiential’ appreciation of the agent’s emotional/mental state
We previously described a perceptual distortion of neutral facial expressions induced by the immediately preceding perceptual history of the face [18]
Summary
It is virtually impossible to look at an expression displayed on a human face and not get an immediate impression of the individual’s emotional state of mind. Recent theories of the embodiment of others’ facial expressions [6,7,8,9,10] have suggested that there might be an influence which works in the other way: the perceptual categorization process could be induced (or facilitated) by the involuntary ‘experiential’ appreciation of the agent’s emotional/mental state. In this latter view, an involuntary motor simulation of the observed action, enabled by mirror mechanisms [11,12], causes the observer to ‘experience’ the observed action, which informs about the agent’s emotional/mental state and influences the perceptual categorization of the action [13]. Where deliberate inferences and contextual knowledge can be said to provide a third person perspective, the embodiment (motor simulation) provides the observer with an ‘experiential’ understanding from a first person perspective; these two perspectives could well complement each other
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