其他摘要 | Facial expressions are important non-verbal cues that humans use to convey information and express emotions. As a special facial expression, micro-expression (ME) is an extremely quick and uncontrollable facial movement that lasts for a short time and reveals thoughts and feelings that an individual attempts to cover up. ME recognition is widely used in the fields of national security, judicial interrogation, clinical and education fields as an effective clue for detecting deceptions, as MEs occurred too quickly and are very difficult to detect, scholars have long endeavored to explore and improve individuals' ability to recognize MEs. Facial attractiveness is a relatively stable characteristic of faces, which affects the individual's behavior and neural activity to a certain extent, and plays an important role in individual attitudes, judgments, and major decisions. Though much more difficult to detect and recognize, ME recognition is similar to macro-expression recognition in that it is influenced by facial features. Previous studies suggested that facial attractiveness could influence facial expression recognition processing. However, it remains unclear whether facial attractiveness could also influence ME recognition. The investigation of this issue could improve the theoretical research of the ME recognition mechanism, deepen the understanding of the role of facial attractiveness in the process of expression recognition, and provide a theoretical basis for researchers to design more systematic and efficient ME recognition training tools.
In this research, two studies were conducted to explore the processing of ME recognition. Study 1 used ME recognition task and facial attractiveness rating task to investigate the accuracy and reaction time of three different MEs (positive, neutral, and negative) at two attractiveness levels (attractive, unattractive) in a static condition or dynamically. The results showed that there was a significant interaction between ME and facial attractiveness, MEs were recognized much faster on attractive faces than on unattractive ones. Furthermore, attractive happy faces were recognized faster in both the static and the dynamic conditions, highlighting the happiness superiority effect. Study 2 was divided into two experiments. Experiment 2 used eye-tracking technology to further investigate the effect of facial attractiveness on ME recognition and its eye movement pattern. Through the eye movement analysis of four eye movement indicators (Total Fixation Duration, First Fixation Duration, Percentage of Fixation Time, and Fixation Count) in three areas of interest (eye/brow, nose, and mouth), the results showed that facial attractiveness changed the eye movement pattern of individuals in the process of ME recognition. We observed that the eye/brows always attracted the highest proportion of fixations and fixation time, followed by the nose, and the least in the mouth area. Compared with unattractive faces, participants gazed at attractive faces for longer and more times in the eye/brow area. For happy expressions, participants gazed at attractive faces in the eye/brow area for longer and more times; for disgust expressions, participants gazed at unattractive faces in the nose area for longer and gazed at attractive faces in the eye/brow area more frequently. The study also discovered that during the ME recognition process, participants looked first at the eye/brow and nose areas, then at the mouth area. The first fixation time in the eye/brow area of unattractive faces was significantly longer than that of attractive faces, indicating that participants would prioritize the eye/brow area of attractive faces. In experiment 3, the pre-training model based on the DAN algorithm was used for testing. The results showed that the model had higher accuracy in the eye/brow area and had higher sensitivity to happy expressions, indicating that the attention resource allocation of human eye recognition and machine recognition was consistent to a certain extent. These findings indicate that when attractive faces are associated with positive MEs, facial attractiveness has a facilitating effect on ME recognition; the attention bias caused by facial attractiveness is affected by expression valence. For attractive faces, participants pay more attention to the eye/brow and nose areas of happiness, and there is no significant difference for unattractive faces.
Therefore, our results provide evidence for the influence of facial attractiveness on ME recognition and explore its behavioral characteristics and attentional mechanisms. The results are consistent with the theories of the evaluative congruence account and the Happy-Face-Advantage, and provide more evidence to support the theories. Through the cross-study of computer vision technology and cognitive psychology, this study expands the theoretical model of influencing factors of ME recognition, provides new evidence for the research of ME recognition based on the attention mechanism, and provides new clues for the development of ME database and ME recognition training in the field of ME detection and recognition. |
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