Sensitivity is defined as measurement of the proportion of neutral expression in a stimulus required for participants to discriminate the emotional expression on 75% of presentations. The expression was diluted to different degrees by combining it in different proportions with the neutral expression using morphing software.
Sensitivity is measured by asking participants to discriminate between an emotional facial expression and a neutral expression of the same face. It shows that individual participants are more sensitive to happy than to fearful expressions and that the differences are statistically significant using the model-comparison approach. In our daily perception of facial expressions, we depend on an ability to generalize across the varied distances at which they may appear.This paper describes a method to measure the sensitivity of an individual to different facial expressions. This is important to how we interpret the quality and the intensity of the expression. Previous research has not investigated whether this so called perceptual constancy also applies to the experienced intensity of facial expressions. Using a psychophysical measure (Borg CR100 scale) the present study aimed to further investigate perceptual constancy of happy and angry facial expressions at varied sizes, which is a proxy for varying viewing distances. Seventy-one (42 females) participants rated the intensity and valence of facial expressions varying in distance and intensity.
The results demonstrated that the perceived intensity (PI) of the emotional facial expression was dependent on the distance of the face and the person perceiving it. An interaction effect was noted, indicating that close-up faces are perceived as more intense than faces at a distance and that this effect is stronger the more intense the facial expression truly is. The present study raises considerations regarding constancy of the PI of happy and angry facial expressions at varied distances.Įmotional facial expressions are a vital part of the human non-verbal communicative system. It helps motivate actions and guide behavior.
We are frequently confronted with facial expressions and many aspects of this type of socioemotional communication have been well documented in previous research, such as the ability to discriminate and categorize facial expressions ( Etcoff and Magee, 1992 Young et al., 1997 Fugate, 2013), the cultural universality or diversity of facial expressions ( Ekman et al., 1987 Jack et al., 2012) and how facial expressions evoke emotions in the perceiver ( Wild et al., 2001). However, research into whether capability to interpret socioemotional information is dependent on the ability to recognize emotional facial expressions, regardless of whether seen from an angle ( Matsumoto and Hwang, 2011 Skowronski et al., 2014) or from a distance ( Du and Martinez, 2011 Guo, 2013), is surprisingly scarce. When perceiving a familiar object the characteristics of that object are recognized irrespective of the situation in which it is perceived ( Kulikowski and Walsh, 1998). For example, when a known object is presented from a rare angle or at a distance we usually perceive it as the same object even though the retinal image differs from our general representation of that object. The ability to estimate, without effort, the true size of objects irrespective of their retinal size is called size constancy ( Kulikowski and Walsh, 1998 Wagner, 2012).
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