The role of bodily signals in facial expression recognition

Abstract

This thesis examines the role of facial mimicry during tasks of facial emotional expression recognition. The first study examines whether facial proprioception modulates the ability to recognise facial expressions, and/or facial mimicry. Results showed that, although mimicry was detected, participants' recognition ability was not modulated by their facial proprioceptive ability. Study 2 examines whether and how the presence of contextual information that are either congruent or incongruent with emotional facial expressions modulates the accuracy of the recognition of the expression and/or facial mimicry. Study 3 has a similar method and design to the second and includes both clear-cut and low-intensity emotional facial expressions. Taken together, Studies 2 and 3 show that the ambiguity of facial expressions and/or the affective incongruence of linguistic context decreased the recognition ability of happy and angry faces. In the fourth chapter we report two EEG-EMG studies (Study 4 and 5) aimed at examining the relationship between facial mimicry and ERPs associated with emotional processing (EPN and N400). The two studies compare the time-course of these ERPs with that of facial mimicry during a fast valence detection task (Study 4) and an explicit emotional recognition task (Study 5), to examine the interplay between cognitive processes and facial mimicry. The facial expressions used in both studies cover four levels of intensity per emotion. Study 4 involves a valence detection task of rapidly exposed emotional facial expressions. The task of Study 5 measured instead the participant's ability to recognise discrete emotional expressions. Findings from both studies are in line with the hypothesis that N400 is sensitive to the augmented demand of an emotion recognition task. The studies' findings suggest that internal simulation occurs especially in case of increased task demand and develops through a complementary cognitive-peripheral process where mimicry responds selectively in respect to central activity.