Erkennungsleistung mimisch expressiver Stimuli bei Sichtbarkeitsdauern kleiner 100 Millisekunden

Abstract

RECOGNITION PERFORMANCE OF FACIAL DISPLAYED EMOTIONS UNDER VERY BRIEF STIMULUS DURATIONS

Recognition and assessment of facial displayed emotions is a highly specialized and therefore very quick process that helps us orientate in our social surrounding. In previous studies recognition performance to identify facial displayed emotions was explored with stimulus durations from 50 to 200 milliseconds. In this study we concentrated on examin identification thresholds under very brief stimulus durations from about 7 to 80 milliseconds to refine established thresholds. A total of N=98 healthy subjects were tested with a combination of a modified version of the t-FEEL software system, a Dell 1,66 Ghz Notebook and a Iiyama 19-inch cathode ray tube monitor to display the stimuli. The t-FEEL software system is a special tool to measure reliabely and objective the recognition performance of the six facial displayed basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise). After stepwise presentation under different stimulus durations from 7 to 80 milliseconds the volunteers should identify the shown emotion after an forced-choice paradigma. As stimulus material we used a modified version of the JACFEE/JACNeuF coloured portrait photos of Matsumoto. After digitalizing and tuning them up to same brightness levels we cut to size them that only parts of the face coding for emotion were left visible. According to other studies we could show that the recognition performance for the emotion „joy“ was highest. In Contrast recognition performance for fear and disgust were lowest compared to others. We could show that recognition performance is significantly dependand on display duration. Averaged over all emotions there was no increase in recognition performance with display durations above of 45 milliseconds. No differences in recogntion performance could be seen in between males and females.