Spatial frequency and valence interact in complex emotion perception

ABSTRACT

Research on spatial frequency contributions to facial emotion identification has largely focused on basic emotions. The present experiment characterised spatial frequency contributions to decoding complex emotions, which can be less visible and intense than basic emotions. We investigated the effects of spatial frequency, expression valence and perceptually available features (full face or eyes only) on decoding accuracy. We observed main effects of all factors, with better performance for high (relative to low) spatial frequency, for positive (relative to negative) emotions and for full face (relative to eyes only) conditions. We also observed an interaction of all factors. The high spatial frequency advantage in decoding accuracy was eliminated only for full faces expressing more positive complex emotions. These findings suggest advantages from high spatial frequency content in accurately decoding complex emotions may attenuate when positive complex emotions are decoded from the spatial frequency content of a broader constellation of features.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatial frequency
• complex emotions
• emotion recognition
• valence

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by NSF-1748461 awarded to KH.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Of 169 participants, 138 identified as White. Because targets were White, we verified the effects of interest were significant when including race (non-White = –1, White = 1) in the model and that race did not explain additional variance, χ² (8) = 2.99, p = .93.

2 Unlike basic emotion research (e.g., Kumar & Srinivasan, 2011), the current work had unlimited dwell times. To mitigate concerns that dwell times affected our effects, we removed 159 trials where reaction times were over 3SDs from individual means and re-ran the model controlling for standardized reaction time. All effects maintained direction and significance.

3 No difference in decoding more positive complex emotions from LSF full faces versus HSF eye regions emerged, OR = 0.78, SE = 0.14, z = 1.43, p = .48, 95% CI [0.50, 1.22].

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences: [Grant Number 1748461].