Abstract
Interpreting another’s true emotion is important for social communication, even in the face of deceptive facial cues. Because spatial frequency components provide important clues for recognizing facial expressions, we investigated how we use spatial frequency information from deceptive faces to interpret true emotion. We conducted two different tasks: a face-generating experiment in which participants were asked to generate deceptive and genuine faces by tuning the intensity of happy and angry expressions (Experiment 1) and a face-classification task in which participants had to classify presented faces as either deceptive or genuine (Experiment 2). Low- and high-spatial frequency (LSF and HSF) components were varied independently. The results showed that deceptive happiness (i.e., anger is the hidden expression) involved different intensities for LSF and HSF. These results suggest that we can identify hidden anger by perceiving unbalanced intensities of emotional expression between LSF and HSF information contained in deceptive faces.
Highlights
In our daily communication, facial expressions are one of the main cues used to understand other people’s emotions or internal states
The spatial frequency components of faces provide critical clues for recognizing facial expressions (Farah et al, 1998; Ruiz-Soler and Beltran, 2006). It is not clear how we use such spatial frequency information in deceptive faces to interpret true emotion, and whether the contribution of Low-spatial frequencies (LSFs) and high-spatial frequencies (HSFs) differs between deceptive happiness and anger facial expressions
We asked participants to generate deceptive and genuine faces by tuning the intensities of happiness and anger, which were contained in both LSF and HSF components (Experiment 1), and to classify presented faces composed of LSF and HSF images as either genuine happiness, genuine anger, deceptive happiness, or deceptive anger (Experiment 2)
Summary
Facial expressions are one of the main cues used to understand other people’s emotions or internal states. We do depend on understanding true emotions in order to establish good personal relationships. Interpreting true emotion is important for favorable communication (King, 1998; Butler and Gross, 2004). Observers can discriminate between genuine and deceptive facial expressions rather rapidly (Porter and Ten Brinke, 2008). The interpretation of facial expressions depends on the observer. This is because one observer might judge a face as showing genuine anger, whereas another observer might judge the same face as showing deceptive anger. The type of facial information that is used for interpreting another person’s hidden emotions or recognizing deceptive faces is unclear
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