The within-subjects design in the study of facial expressions

Abstract

The common within-subjects design of studies on the recognition of emotion from facial expressions allows the judgement of one face to be influenced by previous faces, thus introducing the potential for artefacts. The present study (N=344) showed that the canonical “disgust face” was judged as disgusted, provided that the preceding set of faces included “anger expressions”, but was judged as angry when the preceding set of faces excluded anger but instead included persons who looked sad or about to be sick. Chinese observers showed lower recognition of the “disgust face” than did American observers. Chinese observers also showed lower recognition of the “fear face” when responding in Chinese than in English.

Keywords:

• Facial expression
• Emotion
• Disgust
• Fear
• Method artefact

Acknowledgments

Preparation of this article was facilitated by RGC General Research Fund (644508) to MY and by NSF grant BSC-0421702 to JAR.

We thank Luis Acevedo, Loretta Chan, Francis Ho, Dennis Li, Nicole Nelson, Cheryl Tso, Karin Wang, Matthew Williams, and Kevin Zeng for their help with data collection.