Recognition of emotion in moving and static composite faces

We investigated the role of holistic processing for the perception of facial emotion and its interaction with non-rigid motion. Using an experimental paradigm by Young et al reported in 1987, we tested recognition performance of aligned and misaligned composite faces with six basic emotions (happiness, fear, disgust, surprise, anger, sadness). Stimuli were shown as 3-D animated realistic video sequences (moving condition) and as static peak expressions (static condition). The results (N=24) revealed that misaligned composites were better recognised than aligned composites, both for static and moving stimuli. When the two halves were aligned, a new emotion resembling each of the two originals seemed to emerge, suggesting holistic processing. This made it very difficult to identify the emotions from either half. When the top and bottom halves were misaligned horizontally (impairment of holistic processing), the two halves did fuse significantly less to create a new emotion, and the constituent halves remained identifiable. Whereas moving stimuli were better recognised than static faces, there was no interaction between motion and alignment. These results indicate that facial-expression processing is holistic in static and moving faces to a similar degree