Abstract
The Cone of Direct Gaze (CoDG) is the range of gaze directions that an observer judges as being directed towards them. It is a new indicator of eye gaze research field in recent years, to quantify the tendency of direct gaze judgment. Previous studies have found that eye gaze perception is influenced by facial expressions, angry faces have a wider CoDG than fearful faces. Although there are some explanations for why facial expressions affect the perception of gaze direction, it is not clear whether the effect of expressions on the eye gaze perception dues to the component information or configural information. In the current study, we conducted three behavioral experiments, adopted the CoDG as the dependent variable, and used three type of facial picture (upside, inverted, blur), try to separate the effect of facial component or configural information on the interaction between threatening emotion and gaze direction, to explore the above questions. We set three emotional expressions (angry, fearful, neutral) and eleven gaze directions (-5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) in the current study. Participants were required to indicate whether a face with emotional expression was looking towards or away from them. Three artificial male faces created with Daz software were used for this study.
In experiment 1, artificial upside faces were used as stimulus material. The main aim of experiment 1 was to verify the reliability of the emotion effect on CoDG using artificial faces. 30 participants (15 female, 15 male) completed the gaze perception task. The result showed the CoDG for angry faces was wider than fearful faces, demonstrated the difference of anger and fear on the perception of gaze directions was widespread exist.
In experiment 2, inverted faces were used as experimental materials. Inversion has been shown to hamper configural processing, while impairing component processing to a much lesser degree. 34 participants (19 female, 15 male) attended this experiment. The result showed no significant difference of CoDG between angry and fearful expressions. This result indicated that the different effect of anger and fear on gaze perception mainly stems from the differences in the configurational information between the two, rather than component information.
In experiment 3, blur faces were used as experimental materials to further verify the conclusion of experiment 2. Blur face is largely disrupted component information while saving configural information. 32 participants (15 female, 17 male) attended this experiment. The result showed the CoDG of anger was wider than fear in blur condition. In accordance with the prior assumption, this result of experiment 3 further verified conclusion of experiment 2.
Overall, these results indicated that the influence of different threatening facial expressions on eye gaze perception is not dependent on components information, but configurational information. These findings showed that the interaction between emotion and eye gaze is mainly due to high-level emotional meaning, but not the lower- level feature. Our findings support the explanation of shared signal hypothesis and Emotion Appraisal Hypothesis for the integration between emotion and gaze direction.
Key words
Facial expressions, The Cone of Direct Gaze (CoDG), Angry face, Fearful face
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The effect of threatening facial expressions on the perception of gaze direction[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2020, 43(3): 549-556
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