In this experiment you viewed pictures of faces displaying one of five facial expressions of emotion (happy, sad, disgust, anger, fear). The faces could appeared naturally or with added sunglasses or COVID style mask coving nose and mouth. The task on each trial was to categorize the emotion. Past research has indicated that specific facial features are essential for categorizing emotional expressions from faces. In particular, Blais et al 2012, indicated that across all emotions overall information from the mouth is the most important visual cue for judging emotion, this is then followed by information cues from the eyes. In the present experiment we set explore the impact that covering parts of the face would have on emotion categorization accuracy. We reasoned that performance would be worst for faces shown with a COVID style face mask, improved but still poorer for sunglasses and best when there was no face covering at all. Further research has indicated that different facial features are essential for categorizing different emotional expressions e.g. the wide open eyes are vital to displays of fear, an upturned smiling mouth is essential for happiness. In an extended analysis considering the emotional expressions separately will allow an exploration of expression specific patterns of the importance of different visual information.
Experiment details
Stimuli source: The racially diverse affective expression (RADIATE) face stimulus set. Stimuli identities: 6 male, 6 female balanced across black, white and Asian models. Stimuli emotions: Happy, Sad, Disgust, Anger, Fear
Response options: Happy, Sad, Disgust, Anger, Fear, Don’t know.
Procedure: Each stimulus was presented once per condition (naturally, sunglasses, COVID style mask) for 2 seconds (or less if a response was made), response options remained on screen until a response was given.
Total number of trials = 180 (split into 4 blocks of 45)
Coding platform: Gorilla
Lab Report 3 requirements
All sections must be present and attempted: Title
Abstract
Introduction
Methods – DESIGN, PARTICIPANTS, MATERIALS, PROCEDURE – ETHICS STATEMENT Results – DESCRIPTIVE (in text and figures), CHOICE OF TEST, INFERENTIAL TEST – correctly reported
Discussion
References
Appendices – Pre-Registration
Core components:
Hypothesis: One main hypothesis regarding the impact of masks and sunglasses on emotional expression categorization
Analysis: ANOVA and follow up tests
Extended analysis:
Hypothesis: Specific to happy or fear or both expressions. Analysis: Emotion specific ANOVA and follow up tests
Note if you choose to do the extended analysis you should write only one introduction, one methods, one results and one discussion section. You should position all of your hypothesis together at the end of the introduction, all of your results are presented one after the other in the results section and then discussed in turn in the discussion.
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