威胁相关面孔表情对眼睛注视方向知觉的影响

以往研究发现眼睛注视方向知觉受面孔表情的影响，愤怒面孔相较于恐惧面孔更倾向被判断为看着观察者。虽然研究者对此提出了不同的解释，但目前尚不清楚愤怒和恐惧表情在注视方向知觉中的这种差异影响到底来自于面孔的结构信息还是物理特征信息。本研究采用注视方向辨别任务，计算直视知觉范围（The Cone of Direct Gaze，CoDG）为因变量，分别以直立，倒置及模糊图片为实验材料，试图通过分离面孔结构信息和物理特征信息，对以上问题进行探讨。结果发现在保留面孔全部信息的情况下（实验1）愤怒面孔的CoDG大于恐惧面孔；在破坏结构信息加工，只保留特征信息加工的情况下（实验2））愤怒和恐惧表情在直视知觉范围上的差异消失了；在削弱物理特征信息加工，保留结构信息加工的情况下（实验3）二者在CoDG上的差异又复现。本研究结果说明不同威胁性面孔表情对眼睛注视知觉的影响主要来自于二者在与情绪意义相关的结构信息加工上的不同，而二者非低级的物理信息上的差异，支持信号共享假说和情绪评价假说对威胁性面孔表情与注视方向整合加工解释的理论基础。

The effect of threatening facial expressions on the perception of gaze direction

The Cone of Direct Gaze (CoDG) is the range of gaze directions that an observer judges as being directed towards them. It is a new indicator of eye gaze research field in recent years, to quantify the tendency of direct gaze judgment. Previous studies have found that eye gaze perception is influenced by facial expressions, angry faces have a wider CoDG than fearful faces. Although there are some explanations for why facial expressions affect the perception of gaze direction, it is not clear whether the effect of expressions on the eye gaze perception dues to the component information or configural information. In the current study, we conducted three behavioral experiments, adopted the CoDG as the dependent variable, and used three type of facial picture (upside, inverted, blur), try to separate the effect of facial component or configural information on the interaction between threatening emotion and gaze direction, to explore the above questions. We set three emotional expressions (angry, fearful, neutral) and eleven gaze directions (-5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) in the current study. Participants were required to indicate whether a face with emotional expression was looking towards or away from them. Three artificial male faces created with Daz software were used for this study. In experiment 1, artificial upside faces were used as stimulus material. The main aim of experiment 1 was to verify the reliability of the emotion effect on CoDG using artificial faces. 30 participants (15 female, 15 male) completed the gaze perception task. The result showed the CoDG for angry faces was wider than fearful faces, demonstrated the difference of anger and fear on the perception of gaze directions was widespread exist.In experiment 2, inverted faces were used as experimental materials. Inversion has been shown to hamper configural processing, while impairing component processing to a much lesser degree. 34 participants (19 female, 15 male) attended this experiment. The result showed no significant difference of CoDG between angry and fearful expressions. This result indicated that the different effect of anger and fear on gaze perception mainly stems from the differences in the configurational information between the two, rather than component information.In experiment 3, blur faces were used as experimental materials to further verify the conclusion of experiment 2. Blur face is largely disrupted component information while saving configural information. 32 participants (15 female, 17 male) attended this experiment. The result showed the CoDG of anger was wider than fear in blur condition. In accordance with the prior assumption, this result of experiment 3 further verified conclusion of experiment 2.Overall, these results indicated that the influence of different threatening facial expressions on eye gaze perception is not dependent on components information, but configurational information. These findings showed that the interaction between emotion and eye gaze is mainly due to high-level emotional meaning, but not the lower- level feature. Our findings support the explanation of shared signal hypothesis and Emotion Appraisal Hypothesis for the integration between emotion and gaze direction.