Macizo, P. 1 , Boldini, A. 2 & Herrera, A. 3
1 Departamento de Psicología Experimental y, Fisiología del Comportamiento, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain
2 Departament de Psicologia Bàsica; Facultat de Psicologia; Universitat de Barcelona; Barcelona; Spain
3 Departamento de Psicología Básica y Metodología, Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain
In order to decide whether someone is happy or sad, we evaluate his/her facial expression. Facial expressions are universal and each emotional state can be measured on the basis of several facial dimensions (Ekman, 2009). There are two features that mainly determine the recognition of face expressions and feelings: mouth and eyes (Ambadar, Cohn, & Reed, 2009). When a person is happy or sad, morphological characteristics of mouth and eyes follow a specific configuration based on several parameters (opening, amplitude, symmetry). In this study we evaluate the consequences of presenting emotionally incongruent parameters of facial expressions. Participants were required to judge whether a person was happy or sad by evaluating eyes expressions. There were congruent faces (smiling eyes and mouth), control faces (smiling eyes and neutral mouth) and incongruent faces (smiling eyes and sad mouth). Relative to control faces, participants showed better recognition performance with congruent faces and worse recognition performance with incongruent faces. These results suggest that people consider eyes and mouth when recognizing feelings and that they get confused when face dimensions are incongruent.