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. 2020 Jun 4:11:1062.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01062. eCollection 2020.

Recognition of Emotions From Facial Point-Light Displays

Christel Bidet-Ildei  1   2   3   4 , Arnaud Decatoire  1   4   5 , Sandrine Gil  1   2   3   4
Affiliations

Recognition of Emotions From Facial Point-Light Displays

Christel Bidet-Ildei et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Facial emotion recognition occupies a prominent place in emotion psychology. How perceivers recognize messages conveyed by faces can be studied in either an explicit or an implicit way, and using different kinds of facial stimuli. In the present study, we explored for the first time how facial point-light displays (PLDs) (i.e., biological motion with minimal perceptual properties) can elicit both explicit and implicit mechanisms of facial emotion recognition. Participants completed tasks of explicit or implicit facial emotion recognition from PLDs. Results showed that point-light stimuli are sufficient to allow facial emotion recognition, be it explicit and implicit. We argue that this finding could encourage the use of PLDs in research on the perception of emotional cues from faces.

Keywords: emotion; emotional recognition; face; point-light display; priming.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Priming task procedure. The point-light sequence, fixation cross, and word stimulus were successively displayed in the center of the screen. The arrow represents the sequence of one trial.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Mean proportion of congruent responses as a function of prime (PLD expression) valence (i.e., negative vs positive). The asterisks indicate a significance level of p < 0.001.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Mean response times as a function of prime (PLD expression) valence (i.e., negative vs positive). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. The asterisks indicate a significance level of p < 0.01.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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