| Abstract: | Abstract The recognition of face emotion in multi-channel processing means any effects involving in various channels, especially in vision, audition, and olfaction. In real life, faces are always recognized together with their corresponding environmental conditions. Considering the actual situation, researches bring in other potential factors affecting the processing procedure. Previous studies focused mainly on the role of body cues. For both of them are visual cues, the body languages and face emotions recognition may share same processing modes and adjacent brain area, so the interaction between each other is not surprising. As we know, a number of sounds and odors are also perceived as emotional stimuli, and they also contain some certain cognitive emotional elements. Even if these interactions exist in some certain conditions, a lot of researches are conducted to reveal the internal mechanism. We reviewed evidence from multiple research projects in numerous types, all providing support for the idea that multi-channel information plays an important role in processing emotional faces. The origin of the related context effects are elucidated in the introduction. Based on varied channels, we details body language, emotional sounds and particular odors systematically influence the face perception in part 2, part 3 and part 4, respectively. In each part, researchers learned interaction effects among the related factors by participants’ behavioral reaction. And their timing, potential mechanisms, related cortical activities are discussed in ERP and brain imaging technology studies. A set of extent problems and prospects on are raised in part 5. The information in each channel involved in face emotion recognition are used efficiently, and they influence on the procedure itself based on the certain condition. The effects work at the perceptual level instead of higher mental activity. It indicates that in “real life” what we see as angry, fearful, and so forth, is not the faces that we see, but is the result of combination of information from different channels. The early processing of body language is also automatic, and it has overlap with face emotion processing on the perception mode and nerve networks. Specifically, it shifts the scanning pattern of emotional faces when identification information is insufficient. Sounds contain not only human voice, but the artificial sounds also influence on emotion recognition. Olfactory stimuli often modulate face emotion processing under the condition of unconscious identification, but women are especially sensitive to subtle smells and so on. Researches in the future could bring in more interdisciplinary techniques to systematically build network modals for investigating the physical attributes of face perception.Key words facial expression, multi-channel effects, face emotion recognition, body language, emotional sounds, olfactory signals |
