Abstract
Facial emotion recognition occupies a prominent place in emotion psychology. How perceivers recognize messages conveyed by faces can be studied in either an explicit or an implicit way, and using different kinds of facial stimuli. In the present study, we explored for the first time how facial point-light displays (PLDs) (i.e., biological motion with minimal perceptual properties) can elicit both explicit and implicit mechanisms of facial emotion recognition. Participants completed tasks of explicit or implicit facial emotion recognition from PLDs. Results showed that point-light stimuli are sufficient to allow facial emotion recognition, be it explicit and implicit. We argue that this finding could encourage the use of PLDs in research on the perception of emotional cues from faces.
Highlights
Because of their crucial role in everyday life, facial expressions have become an important research topic in the field of human interactions
The aim of the present study was to assess whether the presentation of emotional facial point-light displays (PLDs) can elicit both explicit and implicit processes of facial emotion recognition
Concerning explicit emotion recognition, results showed similar performance that these observed in literature for full-light emotions and comparable methodology (for multiple-force choice tasks, see for example the review’s of Nelson and Russell (2013) based on 39 sets of data) and PLD emotions (Bassili, 1979)
Summary
Because of their crucial role in everyday life, facial expressions have become an important research topic in the field of human interactions They are key to social communication, as they can promote mental state inference and emotion induction in the perceiver (e.g., Wood et al, 2016). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether facial PLDs can elicit two important processes: explicit (explicit judgment) and implicit (via a priming task) emotion recognition. Researchers study facial emotion recognition using either explicit or implicit tasks In the former, which are widely used, participants have to explicitly judge emotions conveyed by target faces (e.g., Calvo and Lundqvist, 2008; Adolph and Alpers, 2010). Neuroscience studies (see Dricu and Frühholz, 2016, for a meta-analysis) and behavioral findings in individuals with psychiatric disorders (e.g., Wagenbreth et al, 2016) argue in favor of this distinction
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