The complex duration perception of emotional faces: effects of face direction.

Katrin M Kliegl,Anke Huckauf,Kerstin Limbrecht-Ecklundt,Lea Dürr,Harald C Traue

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00262

Abstract

The perceived duration of emotional face stimuli strongly depends on the expressed emotion. But, emotional faces also differ regarding a number of other features like gaze, face direction, or sex. Usually, these features have been controlled by only using pictures of female models with straight gaze and face direction. Doi and Shinohara (2009) reported that an overestimation of angry faces could only be found when the model’s gaze was oriented toward the observer. We aimed at replicating this effect for face direction. Moreover, we explored the effect of face direction on the duration perception sad faces. Controlling for the sex of the face model and the participant, female and male participants rated the duration of neutral, angry, and sad face stimuli of both sexes photographed from different perspectives in a bisection task. In line with current findings, we report a significant overestimation of angry compared to neutral face stimuli that was modulated by face direction. Moreover, the perceived duration of sad face stimuli did not differ from that of neutral faces and was not influenced by face direction. Furthermore, we found that faces of the opposite sex appeared to last longer than those of the same sex. This outcome is discussed with regards to stimulus parameters like the induced arousal, social relevance, and an evolutionary context.

Highlights

There is growing evidence indicating that duration perception of emotional and neutral stimulus material is different
The bisection point (BP) is a commonly used measure in time perception (Grondin, 2008). It is defined as the 50% threshold at which the subject shows a maximum of uncertainty when estimating the duration of a stimulus
A shift to the left on the x-axis indicates an overestimation of the stimulus, as in the example, an angry face has to be presented for 810 ms in order to equal the objective threshold

Summary

Introduction

There is growing evidence indicating that duration perception of emotional and neutral stimulus material is different (for reviews see, e.g., Droit-Volet and Meck, 2007; Droit-Volet and Gil, 2009; Schirmer, 2011). For faces there seems to be no general overestimation of emotional faces, but the effect strongly depends on the specific emotion being expressed To this regard, Gil and Droit-Volet (2011a) report that facial expressions of anger, fear, sadness, and happiness go along with an overestimation of time, whereas the facial expression of disgust did not lead to any temporal distortion and the facial expression of shame even caused an underestimation of time (Gil and Droit-Volet, 2011c).

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion