Abstract
The worldwide fascination of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been dedicated to the emotional ambiguity of her face expression. In the present study we manipulated Mona Lisa’s mouth curvature as one potential source of ambiguity and studied how a range of happier and sadder face variants influences perception. In two experimental conditions we presented different stimulus ranges with different step sizes between stimuli along the happy-sad axis of emotional face expressions. Stimuli were presented in random order and participants indicated the perceived emotional face expression (first task) and the confidence of their response (second task). The probability of responding ‘happy’ to the original Mona Lisa was close to 100%. Furthermore, in both conditions the perceived happiness of Mona Lisa variants described sigmoidal functions of the mouth curvature. Participants’ confidence was weakest around the sigmoidal inflection points. Remarkably, the sigmoidal functions, as well as confidence values and reaction times, differed significantly between experimental conditions. Finally, participants responded generally faster to happy than to sad faces. Overall, the original Mona Lisa seems to be less ambiguous than expected. However, perception of and reaction to the emotional face content is relative and strongly depends on the used stimulus range.
Highlights
During the recent years, the elusive quality of Mona Lisa’s painting has been object of scientific investigations[19,20]
In a second experimental condition (Half-Range Condition) we reduced the range of face expressions, taking da Vinci’s variant as the most unambiguously happy face and decreasing the step size between sadder face variants, in order to increase the “resolution of emotional ambiguity”
In each block we presented a sequence of nine Mona Lisa (ML) variants, ranging from the happiest to the saddest emotion
Summary
The elusive quality of Mona Lisa’s painting has been object of scientific investigations[19,20]. All studies – to our best knowledge – take Mona Lisa’s emotional face expression as a priori ambiguous. We created a number of Mona Lisa’s variants by manipulating the curvature of the mouth in a systematic manner, in order to stepwise disambiguate them towards happy and sad face expressions. The happiness bias of da Vinci’s original remained with this smaller range of emotional faces, but the resulting psychometric function differed from the first condition (Full-Range Condition). This indicates that the range of emotional face expressions strongly influences the perception of the individual face.
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