Effects of adaptation to movies of emotions on emotion perception

• Main Author: Lew, Yu Ting
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Psychology::Experimental psychology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/57031
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Dynamically moving faces had been shown to have an advantage over static faces when it comes to face recognition. However, dynamic motion has rarely been applied to facial expression adaptation paradigm. Hence, the presence of the aftereffect and the level of processing remained unknown. In this study, we created dynamic movies of changing emotions by showing multiple emotional face images, and investigated its effect on facial expression adaptation. Firstly, this study found aftereffects arising from the adaptation to the dynamic movies of changing emotions. More importantly, regardless of the sequence, the visual information of emotion was the main factor during dynamic adaptation. For example, adapting to both movies changing from happy to neutral (“h-n”), and neutral to happy (“n-h”) resulted in similar aftereffects. Also, this study showed that the aftereffects of dynamic happy adaptation were not significantly different from static happy adaptation. This was in line with previous study whereby happy emotion was found to be highly recognizable and dynamic motion did not provide significant advantage. While dynamic motion has been associated with activation in higher cortical areas, such as V5, the dynamic adaptation displayed positional specificity when the testing stimulus was displayed away from the adapting stimulus. Participants also did not show expectancies when adapting to the movies of changing emotions. Hence, these findings suggested that the dynamic facial expression adaptation was a low-level process.