Investigation on the relationship between the facial emotion recognition, emotions and task situations

Background and Aim: Successful recognition of various facial emotional expressions facilitates everyday social interactions. Although previous studies have shown that recognition of various emotions is not equally efficient, the task situations could also influence the observer's ability in recognizing different emotional expressions. Methods Fifty-six volunteers were tested for three different task situations (i.e. labeling, matching and identification). In each task, recognition of five facial expressions (i.e., anger, happiness, sadness, fear and neutral) was assessed. Face images were selected from FACES database. Results: We investigated the extent to which facial expression recognition is influenced by the interactions of task demands and emotional expressions. Conclusion Results showed that reaction times in matching and identification tasks were significantly longer than the labeling task. Performance in identification and matching task conditions was different only for anger and fear facial expressions (longer duration for identification condition). Accuracy was significantly different between all three task situations, with matching and identification having the lowest and highest accuracy levels, respectively. Consistent with the previous studies, happiness was the most efficiently recognized facial expression among all. Based on our observations, sadness had the slowest reaction time between emotions in matching and identification task situations. However, sadness didn't significantly differ from anger in the labeling task. Our results suggested that task characteristics have impacts on perception, and therefore, should be taken into account, specifically when comparing the results of different tasks.

کلیدواژه ها:

facial emotion recognition ، labeling task ، matching task ، identification task