The Influence Of Empathy And Color Background On Body Expression Recognition

The study used body expression set as experimental material,through two experiments exploring the effect of the ability of empathy and background color on physical expression recognition.In experiment 1,controlled the ability of empathy(high score,low score)and background color(orange,blue).Participants in Experiment 1 were asked to judge if the emotion of the image is happy.And degree of pleasure rating of the body's expressive picture.The experiment 1 shows that:a)for color,the percentage was higher with the orange condition than the blue condition;the hedonic value was higher with the orange condition than the blue condition.The reaction time between orange condition and blue condition had no difference.This suggests that emotional cues from color backgrounds can affect the recognition of neutral body expressions.Orange has a positive clue,and Blue has a negative clue.b)the main effect of the ability of empathy is not significant by percentage and hedonic value and reaction time.c)for the interaction effects between the ability of empathy and color were significant by percentage,and not significant by hedonic value and reaction time.The percentage of the person with high score in empathy ability with orange condition was higher than the blue condition,but the person with low score in empathy ability had no difference with tow conditions.This shows that the emotional processing of high empathy is susceptible to background color,but the person with low score of empathy ability lacks this effect.In experiment 2.controlled the ability of empathy(high score,low score)and background color(orange,blue)and emotional valence(happy,sad).Participants in Experiment 2 were asked to judge the emotion of the image belongs to happy or sad.And degree of pleasure rating of the body's expressive picture.The experiment 2 shows that:a)for color,the hedonic value was higher with orange condition than blue condition.And there was no difference with orange condition and blue condition in the accuracy and reaction time.b)for the ability of empathy,there is no difference between high score person and low score person in accuracy and hedonic value and reation time.c)for the emotional valence,the accuracy with happy condition was higher than sad condition;and the speed of discern happy body expression was faster than discriminate the sad one;and there was no difference between the happy condition and sad condition in hedonic value.This suggests that discriminate happy body expression is easer than the sad one.d)for the interaction effects between empathy ability and color were not significant by accuracy hedonic value and reaction time.e)for the interaction effects between empathy ability and emotional valence were not significant by accuracy and hedonic value but by reaction time.The person with low score of empathy ability discern body expression with sad condition was slower than happy condition,and slower than the person with high score.This suggests that the person with low score of empathy ability had difficult to discern the body expression in sad condition.f)for the interaction effects between color and emotional valence were significant by hedonic value,but not by accuracy and reaction time.The hedonic value of happy body expression in orange condition was higher than blue condition,and the sad body expression had no difference between orange condition and blue condition.These results indicated that:a)Recognition of neutral body expression influenced by background color,warm colors provide positive emotional cues,and cool colors provide negative emotional cues.The emotional processing of high empathy is susceptible to background color,but the person with low score of empathy ability lacks this effect.b)The emotion which is easier to identify such as happy is more susceptible to the influence by background color.c)It is difficult for the person with low score of empathy ability to recognize sad body expression.