Research shows that children often confuse facial expressions of fear with surprise and
disgust with anger. According to the perceptual-attentional limitations hypothesis, facial
expressions are confused because they share action units (Camras, 1980; Wiggers, 1982).
Experiment 1 tested this hypothesis for the confusion between fear and surprise and Experiment
2 for the confusion between disgust and anger. Eye movements were monitored in both
experiments. In experiment 1, the results showed that children were more accurate when two
distinctive action units were presented than when the brow lowerer was the only distinctive
action unit differentiating between fear and surprise. Furthermore, the results showed that
participants spent more time fixating on the mouth than the eyebrows. They made more saccades
when the only distinctive cue was in the eyebrows. In experiment 2, participants identified the
emotion as anger when the mouth was open, and disgust when the mouth was closed, spending
more time on the mouth when the mouth was open. These findings suggest that facial
expressions are confused, not only because of the amount of visual similarities they share, but
also because children do not allocate their attention to facial regions equally; they tend to focus
on the mouth.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OSUL.10219/2190 |
| Date | 16 May 2014 |
| Creators | Young, Cheryl |
| Publisher | Laurentian University of Sudbury |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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