Not on the face alone: perception of contextualized face expressions in Huntingtons disease
Not on the face alone: perception of contextualized face expressions in Huntingtons disease
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DOI：
10.1093/brain/awp067
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发表时间：
2009-06-01
期刊：
影响因子：
14.5
通讯作者：
Moscovitch, Morris
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Aviezer, Hillel;Bentin, Shlomo;Moscovitch, Morris
大量研究表明，亨廷顿病突变携带者缺乏对孤立面部表情的明确识别。然而，目前还没有研究调查在情感身体和场景背景下嵌入的面部表情的识别。现实生活中的面部表情通常嵌入在情境中，这可能会极大地改变面部识别的情绪。此外，最近的一项研究表明，情境偏见的程度是由所呈现的面部实际表情与通常符合情境的面部表情之间的相似性所调节的，例如，厌恶的脸与愤怒的脸比悲伤的脸更相似，因此，受表达愤怒的情境的影响比表达悲伤的情境更强烈。由于情境对面部表情感知的影响不受明确控制，因此它们的模式可以作为对面部表情加工的内隐测量。在本研究中，我们利用上下文中的面部设计来比较亨廷顿病突变携带者对面部表情的显式识别，以及对源自隐性测量的表情的处理证据。在最初的实验中，我们对21名亨廷顿病突变携带者进行了面部表情识别的标准测试。与对照组相比，他们在识别厌恶和愤怒的面孔方面表现出缺陷，尽管他们从非面部图像中完整地识别了这些情绪。在随后的实验中，我们将这些厌恶的面孔嵌入到通过肢体语言和其他随身物品表达悲伤和愤怒的人的图像中。此外，悲伤和愤怒的面孔被嵌入到表达厌恶的语境图像中。在两种情况下，参与者都被要求对面部表情进行分类，忽略上下文。尽管缺乏对孤立的厌恶和愤怒面孔的明确识别，但亨廷顿病突变携带者对面孔所表达的情绪的感知受到环境的影响，其方式与对照参与者相似。具体来说，他们对面孔上下文配对表现出同样的敏感性。这些发现表明，尽管亨廷顿病突变携带者对面部表情的明确识别受损，但当嵌入到环境中时，他们对相同面部结构的处理能力相对保持不变。结果还显示，即使实际呈现的面孔表达的是不同的情绪，人们仍然完整地利用了由表达厌恶的面孔的上下文线索所引出的信息。总的来说，我们的研究结果揭示了亨廷顿病突变携带者面部表情识别缺陷的本质，并强调了环境在情绪感知中的重要性。
Numerous studies have demonstrated that Huntingtons disease mutation-carriers have deficient explicit recognition of isolated facial expressions. There are no studies, however, which have investigated the recognition of facial expressions embedded within an emotional body and scene context. Real life facial expressions are typically embedded in contexts which may dramatically change the emotion recognized in the face. Moreover, a recent study showed that the magnitude of the contextual bias is modulated by the similarity between the actual expression of the presented face and the facial expression that would typically fit the context, e.g. disgust faces are more similar to anger than to sadness faces and, consequently, are more strongly influenced by contexts expressing anger than by contexts expressing sadness. Since context effects on facial expression perception are not explicitly controlled, their pattern serves as an implicit measure of the processing of facial expressions. In this study we took advantage of the face-in-context design to compare explicit recognition of face-expressions by Huntingtons disease mutation-carriers, with evidence for processing the expressions deriving from implicit measures. In an initial experiment we presented a group of 21 Huntingtons disease mutation-carriers with standard tests of face-expression recognition. Relative to controls, they displayed deficits in recognizing disgust and anger faces despite intact recognition of these emotions from non-facial images. In a subsequent experiment, we embedded the disgust faces on images of people conveying sadness and anger as expressed by body language and additional paraphernalia. In addition, sadness and anger faces were embedded on context images conveying disgust. In both cases participants were instructed to categorize the facial expressions, ignoring the context. Despite the deficient explicit recognition of isolated disgust and anger faces, the perception of the emotions expressed by the faces was affected by context in Huntingtons disease mutation-carriers in a similar manner as in control participants. Specifically, they displayed the same sensitivity to facecontext pairings. These findings suggest that, despite their impaired explicit recognition of facial expressions, Huntingtons disease mutation-carriers display relatively preserved processing of the same facial configurations when embedded in context. The results also show intact utilization of the information elicited by contextual cues about faces expressing disgust even when the actually presented face expresses a different emotion. Overall, our findings shed light on the nature of the deficit in facial expression recognition in Huntingtons disease mutation-carriers as well as underscore the importance of context in emotion perception.