Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Facial expressions are fundamental emotional stimuli. They convey important information in social interaction. Most previous studies focused on the processing of isolated facial expressions. However, in everyday life, faces always appear within complex scenes. The emotional meaning of the scenes plays an important role in judging facial expressions. Additionally, facial expressions change constantly from appearance to disappearance. Visual scenes may have different effects on the processing of faces with different emotional intensities. Individual personality traits, such as trait anxiety, also affect the processing of facial expressions. For example, individuals with high trait anxiety have processing bias on negative emotional faces. The present study explored whether previously presented visual scenes affected the identification of emotions in morphed facial expressions, and whether the influences of visual scenes on the identification of facial expressions showed differences between individuals with high and low trait anxiety. Using the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), we placed 29 participants who scored in the top 27% in the high trait anxiety group (9 men and 20 women; mean age 19.76 � 1.3 years) and 28 participants who scored in the bottom 27% in the low trait anxiety group (11 males and 17 females, mean age 19.71 � 1.2 years). The images of faces (4 models, half male and half female) used in this study were selected from the NimStim Set of Facial Expressions. The face stimuli showed typical happy, neutral, and fearful expressions. Facial expressions were morphed to create a series of gradually varied images of facial expressions. Specifically, fearful face (100%) versus neutral face (0%) and happy face (100%) versus neutral face (0%) were morphed in 20% increments. In addition, 40 surrounding scene images were used, with 20 positive scenes and 20 negative scenes. In the face-emotion detection task, participants were asked to determine whether the emotion from the faces presented after the scenes were fearful, happy, or neutral. For the repeated measure ANOVA of the accuracy for facial expression detection, the results showed scene effects on the identification of emotions in facial expressions. The scene effects were varied between the different intensity of face emotion: for the emotionally vague faces, the detection of happy and fearful expression showed significant scene effects; for the faces with moderate emotional intensity, only the detection of the fearful faces showed significant scene effects; for the intense emotions on faces, there was a significant effect on happy and neutral faces but not on fearful faces. Trait anxiety as an individual factor was found to play a moderating role in the identification of facial expressions. For the high trait anxiety group, there were no significant differences in the accuracy of emotional detection between congruent and incongruent conditions. This means that the high trait anxiety group did not show significant scene effects. The low trait anxiety group showed a significant difference in the accuracy of identification of emotions in facial expressions between congruent and incongruent conditions, i.e., significant scene effects.In summary, the present study demonstrated that, for facial expressions with low emotional intensity, the identification of happy and fearful faces was more likely to be affected by visual scenes than the identification of neutral faces. Visual scenes were more likely to affect the identification of moderately fearful faces than moderately happy faces. Trait anxiety played a moderating role in the influence of visual scenes on emotional detection of facial expressions. Specifically, individuals with high trait anxiety were less affected by surrounding visual scenes and paid more attention to facial expressions.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2021-09-07
Abstract： Facial expressions are an important medium for understanding the emotional feelings of others. However, individual factors such as gender, age, and personality traits can influence the perception of facial expressions. For instance, individuals with elevated level of trait anxiety, which is measure of frequency and intensity of occurrence of anxiety related symptoms, show attentional bias towards emotional stimuli, that is, higher attention to emotional information such as facial expressions. These studies mostly focused on attentional processing stage, and it remains unclear whether trait anxiety affects the pre-attentive processing stage of facial expression perception. Pre-attentive processing is an automatic evaluation of whether attention is needed for the stimulus, thereby filtering out irrelevant information to conserve cognitive resources and improve the efficiency of information processing. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the pre-attentive processing of facial expressions and the bias to emotional stimuli of trait anxious individuals to emotional stimuli during the pre-attentive processing stage. According to the scores of Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety inventory (STAI), 20 participants who scored in the top 27% were assigned to the high trait anxiety group (13 women; mean age=19.02 ± 0.63 years) and 20 participants who scored in the bottom 27% were assigned to the low trait anxiety group (11 women; mean age=19.63 ± 0.88 years). The stimuli used in the experiment were happy, sad and neutral face pictures selected from the Chinese Facial Affective Picture System (CAFPS; Gong et al., 2011) including 10 pictures (5 females and 5 males) of each kind of emotion. The deviant-standard-reverse oddball paradigm included 4 types of facial expression sequences: neutral standard stimuli/happy deviant stimuli, happy standard stimuli/neutral deviant stimuli; neutral standard stimuli/sad deviant stimuli, and sad standard stimuli/neutral deviant stimuli. The standard stimuli mean that this type of stimuli were appeared about 80% of the time in the sequence, and the deviant stimuli were about 20%. Participants were instructed to detect unpredictable changes in the size of fixation cross in the center of visual field and press a corresponding button as fast and as accurate as possible, and ignored facial expressions. The results revealed that, the amplitudes of N170 elicited by deviant faces were significantly larger than standard faces. Importantly, in the early EMMN, the mean amplitude elicited by sad facial expressions was significantly larger than happy facial expressions in low trait anxiety group, but there was no significant difference between happy and sad facial expressions in high trait anxiety group. Moreover, the early EMMN amplitude of happy faces was significantly larger in the high trait anxiety group than in the low trait anxiety group. These results suggest that the high trait anxiety group has similar amplification of EMMN amplitude for both happy and sad expressions. Our results show that there is a difference between high and low trait anxiety in the pre-attentive processing of facial expression. This suggests that personality traits are important factors influencing the pre-attentive processing of facial expressions, and high trait anxiety individuals may have difficulty in effectively distinguishing between happy and sad emotional faces during the pre-attentive processing stage and have similar processing patterns for them.
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