Eyes and mouths alone matter to recognise happiness and fear

What is it about?

To recognise emotions, we use our face and its features. More recently, a new hypothesis proposed that emotions depend on facial features only as a result of contrast. For instance, we perceive happiness as a result of the colour difference between a person’s lip colour and white teeth, we perceive fear as a result of an increase of the iris and its sclera. This paper investigates whether emotion recognition is due to the facial context (eyes above nose above mouth) with relation to the facial features (eyes or mouth) or only the facial features with no effect from facial context.

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Why is it important?

Emotions help people communicate with each other. This paper states that facial features (e.g. eyes and mouths) are more important than the facial context for the processing of fear and happiness as a result of the varying levels of contrast. This finding can help us to understand how emotions may be recognised and may develop techniques to help people with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.

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