Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

Most research on facial expressions focuses on static, ’emotional’ expressions. Facial expressions, however, are also important in interpersonal communication (’conversational’ expressions). In addition, communication is a highly dynamic phenomenon and previous evidence
suggests that dynamic presentation of stimuli facilitates recognition. Hence, we examined the categorization of emotional and conversational expressions using both static and dynamic stimuli. In a between-subject design, 40 participants were asked to group 55 different facial expressions (either static or dynamic) of ten actors in a free categorization task. Expressions were to be grouped according to their overall similarity. The resulting confusion matrix was used to determine the consistency with which facial expressions were categorized. In the static condition, emotional expressions were grouped as separate categories while participants confused conversational expressions. In the dynamic condition, participants uniquely
categorized basic and sub-ordinate emotional, as well as several conversational facial expressions. Furthermore, a multidimensional scaling analysis suggests that the same potency and valence dimensions underlie the categorization of both static and dynamic expressions. Basic emotional expressions represent the most effective categories when only static information is available. Importantly, however, our results show that dynamic information allows for a much more fine-grained categorization and is essential in disentangling conversational expressions.