Cited by 45Face Recognition and PerceptionEvolutionary Psychology and Human BehaviorFace and Expression Recognition

Invisible expressions evoke core impressions

Laeng, Bruno, Profeti, Italo, Sæther, Line, Adolfsdottir, Steinunn, Lundervold, Astri Johansen, Vangberg, Torgil, Øvervoll, Morten, Johnsen, Stein Harald +1 more·2010·Emotion

Abstract

Participants viewed "hybrid" faces that showed a facial expression (anger, fear, happiness, or sadness) only in the lowest spatial frequency (1-6 cycles/image), which was blended with the same face's neutral expression in the rest of the bandwidth (7-128 cycles/image). Participants rated the portrayed persons (compared to neutral images) as "friendly" when the lowest spatial frequencies showed a positive expression and "unfriendly" when the lowest spatial frequencies showed negative expressions. In contrast, the same hybrid images were explicitly judged as neutral and their "hidden" emotional expressions could not be explicitly recognized, as also confirmed by d' sensitivity measures. Finally, one patient (SS) who had the left anterior temporal lobe surgically resected (including the amygdala), failed to show the above described unconscious effects on friendliness judgments when viewing "afraid" and "sad" hybrid faces. We conclude that the lowest spatial frequencies of facial expressions can evoke "core" emotions without knowledge or awareness of a specific emotion but these core emotions can convey a clear "impression" of a person's character.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1037/a0018689

Cites

100 of 100 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Despite lack of awareness, implicit emotional information in hybrid images influences how friendly faces are rated.

    “Despite the lack of awareness, the implicit emotional information in the images did influence how friendly the faces were rated in relation to a social trait (i.e.friendliness).”
  • Hybrid faces containing hidden anger or happiness, sadness or fear are judged as neutral when observers choose among emotion labels, indicating the hidden expression cannot be consciously acknowledged.

    “Such 'hybrid' faces containing hidden anger or happiness, sadness or fear have been shown to be judged as neutral, when observers are asked to choose among various emotion labels, thus indicating that the underlying, 'hidden', expression cannot be consciously acknowledged (Laeng et al., 2010).”

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Laeng, B., Profeti, I., Sæther, L., Adolfsdottir, S., Lundervold, A. J., Vangberg, T., Øvervoll, M., Johnsen, S. H., & Waterloo, K.
Affiliations
  • University of Oslo (NO)
  • UiT The Arctic University of Norway (NO)
  • University of Bergen (NO)
  • University Hospital of North Norway (NO)
Venue
Emotion
Published
2010-08
Volume
10
Issue
4
Pages
573-586
ISSN
  • 1528-3542 (ISSN-L)
  • 1931-1516
OpenAlex
W2005152264
Cited by
45
References
100
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 4
FWCI
2.13
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Emotion (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Face and Expression Recognition
Keywords
facial expressions, spatial frequency, basic emotions, amygdala, emotion recognition
MeSH terms
Anger, Emotions, Facial Expression, Female, Happiness, Humans, Judgment, Social Perception, Young Adult

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review