Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 44, Issue 3, 1992, Pages 227-240
Cognition

Categorical perception of facial expressions

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(92)90002-YGet rights and content

Abstract

People universally recognize facial expressions of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and perhaps, surprise, suggesting a perceptual mechanism tuned to the facial configuration displaying each emotion. Sets of drawings were generated by computer, each consisting of a series of faces differing by constant physical amounts, running from one emotional expression to another (or from one emotional expression to a neutral face). Subjects discriminated pairs of faces, then, in a separate task, categorized the emotion displayed by each. Faces within a category were discriminated more poorly than faces in different categories that differed by an equal physical amount. Thus emotional expressions, like colors and speech sounds, are perceived categorically, not as a direct reflection of their continuous physical properties.

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    Supported by NIH grant DC00565 to the first author. We thank Susan Carey, Paul Ekman, Steven Pinker, and Gregg Solomon for comments, and Brian Kellner for technical assistance. Parts of this research were presented at the Fifth Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotion, New Brunswick, New Jersey, July, 1990.

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