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Abstract:
What do you have in mind when judging the similarity of two facial expressions? This study investigates how facial expression attributes are linked to the perceived similarity of facial expressions. Participants were shown pictures and videos of 2 types of facial expressions: 6 emotional (e.g. happy) and 6 conversational (e.g. don't understand) expressions. One group of participants was asked to rate several attributes of those expressions (e.g. “how much is the person in control of the situation”, “how much does the mouth move”). Another group rated the pairwise similarity of the expressions. We explored the link between attribute ratings and perceived similarity of expressions using multiple regression analysis. The analysis revealed that different attributes best predicted the similarity ratings of pictures and videos of both facial expressions types, suggesting different evaluation strategies. To rule out the possibility that representational spaces based on expression attributes are different across pictures and videos of both expression types, principal component analysis (PCA) was applied. Significant correlations between all PCA results suggest that those representations are similar. In sum, our study suggests different evaluative strategies for pairwise similarity judgments of pictures and videos of emotional and conversational expressions, despite similar representational spaces for these stimuli.
