시각탐색 반응시간 분포 분석에 기초한 무표정 얼굴의 정서가 특성 평가

초록

Many studies characterizing perceived emotion on one’s face have used emotionless faces as neutral face stimuli. In our daily circumstances, however, an emotionless face tends to represent a negative expression of emotion rather than purely neutral. The present study aimed to compare the saliency of an emotionless face against either smiling or frowning faces, and asked participants to search for a target of an emotionless face among the distractors of either smiling or frowning faces. The analyses of search found delayed RTs as well as inaccurate search performance if the target was displayed among the frowning distractors rather than among smiling faces. The relative inaccuracy of target search was shown to derive from the decrease of sensitivity (d ’) for discriminating the emotionless target from frowning distractor faces. We also compared the search RT distributions according to the ex-Gaussian model across the smiling and frowning distractor conditions. The ex-Gaussian analyses showed that the delayed RTs in the frowning condition owes to an increase of skewness in the distribution as a result of decision and response-selection processes. The skewness became more evident in the target-absent trials with an overall delay in their RTs. The results of the present study indicate that the emotionless faces is more difficult to distinguish from frowning faces than smiling faces if it is displayed among either of the two faces.

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