Perceptual and affective mechanisms in facial expression recognition: An integrative review

Abstract

Facial expressions of emotion involve a physical component of morphological changes in a face and an affective component conveying information about the expresser's internal feelings. It remains unresolved how much recognition and discrimination of expressions rely on the perception of morphological patterns or the processing of affective content. This review of research on the role of visual and emotional factors in expression recognition reached three major conclusions. First, behavioral, neurophysiological, and computational measures indicate that basic expressions are reliably recognized and discriminated from one another, albeit the effect may be inflated by the use of prototypical expression stimuli and forced-choice responses. Second, affective content along the dimensions of valence and arousal is extracted early from facial expressions, although this coarse affective representation contributes minimally to categorical recognition of specific expressions. Third, the physical configuration and visual saliency of facial features contribute significantly to expression recognition, with "emotionless" computational models being able to reproduce some of the basic phenomena demonstrated in human observers. We conclude that facial expression recognition, as it has been investigated in conventional laboratory tasks, depends to a greater extent on perceptual than affective information and mechanisms.

Bodily maps of emotions across child development

“…In sum, the patterns of developmental trajectories of basic emotions differ between recognizing others' expressions versus one's own emotion‐dependent bodily changes. This is hardly surprising considering that the recognition of facial expressions largely depends on perceptual information and on the corresponding neural mechanisms – rather than on affective information and feelings (for a review, see Calvo & Nummenmaa, ) – and that these mechanisms are likely to follow a different developmental trajectory from those involved in bodily sensations.…”

Are event-related potentials to dynamic facial expressions of emotion related to individual differences in the accuracy of processing facial expressions and identity?

“…A recent integrative review concluded that expression recognition relies to a greater extent on perceptual processing of morphological features in the face than on affective processes (Calvo & Nummenmaa, 2016). An intriguing finding in the present study is that individual differences in the ability to recognize emotion from faces are related to the amounts of sensory resources available in two brain systems: those dedicated to the processing of affective informationnamely, the encoding of valence categories-and also those dedicated to perceptual processing per se-namely, the encoding of (nonemotional) changes in facial features unfolding over time.…”

The neural dynamics underlying the interpersonal effects of emotional expression on decision making

“…Therefore, the well-known components in the processing of emotional displays, particularly facial expressions5960 were also analyzed. Those components include occipito-temporal N17059616263 and fronto-central vertex positive potential (VPP)59636465 reflecting attentional capture by emotion, occipito-temporal early posterior negativity (EPN)616667 and fronto-central N259686970 indexing affective discrimination, parietal P300 reflecting sustained attention and elaborative categorization processes5960617172, and fronto-central slow positive wave (SPW) linking with response selection and decision5966. Relevant to the current study, the difference between happy and angry expressions was examined.…”