Processing emotion information from both the face and body: An eye-movement study

Abstract

This study examined the perception of emotional expressions, focusing on the face and the body. Photographs of four actors expressing happiness, sadness, anger, and fear were presented in congruent (e.g., happy face with happy body) and incongruent (e.g., happy face with fearful body) combinations. Participants selected an emotional label using a four-option categorisation task. Reaction times and accuracy for the categorisation judgement, and eye movements were the dependent variables. Two regions of interest were examined: face and body. Results showed better accuracy and faster reaction times for congruent images compared to incongruent images. Eye movements showed an interaction in which there were more fixations and longer dwell times to the face and fewer fixations and shorter dwell times to the body with incongruent images. Thus, conflicting information produced a marked effect on information processing in which participants focused to a greater extent on the face compared to the body.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Facial expressions
• Body emotion
• Eye movements
• Emotion perception

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Andre Bester and Stefania Bracci for technical assistant with the eye tracker and help creating the stimuli. We would also like to thank Mark Moss for help with the statistical analysis. Eva Gilboa-Schechtman and an anonymous reviewer also provided many helpful comments and suggestions throughout the review process.

Notes

¹Accuracy rates between congruent and incongruent images were 93.8% and 89.7%, respectively. Setting aside the differences in chance performance, and comparing these two means using a paired samples t-test revealed a significant difference, t(19) = 2.10, p=.05.

²First fixation times, presented in Table 1, showed that people fixated the face on average 800 ms earlier than the body.