The Influence Of Gesture On Emotional Face Recognition

In interpersonal communication and social interaction,individuals’ recognition and interpretation of others’ emotional information rely on the emotions of others’ faces and extract emotional information from surrounding clues,such as body gestures,pronunciation,and natural scenes.In daily life,individuals’ perception of face emotions is easily affected by background emotional information.For example,body postures can directly affect facial expression recognition.Gesture,as a special body movement,can express and transmit semantic and emotional information.Gesture is more common than body posture in daily life.However,what features of gestures,such as hand and arm features,affect individuals’ recognition of other people’s facial expressions has not been thoroughly explored.In view of this,this study took primary school students(childhood)and college students(adult)as subjects,and tried to explore the influence of gesture on emotional face recognition and its change with age.There are two studies in this paper.The first study explored the effects of gesture features on emotional face recognition and included three experiments.Experiment 1investigated the effects of different gesture features,such as strength,hand and arm,on emotional face recognition.In Experiment 2,we examined the effects of hand and arm characteristics on emotional face recognition.In Experiment 3,we explored the effects of hand and arm features on fuzzy emotional face recognition by controlling the definition of facial emotion.In order to understand the development of the effects of gesture features on emotional face recognition,the second study examined the differences between primary school students and college students in Experiment 4.Experiment 1 revealed that emotion type had significant interaction with arm position and arm strength.Compared with the opening and closing of hands,the position of the arm had a more significant effect on emotional face recognition.Powerful gestures enhanced the accuracy and arousal of emotional face recognition.In Experiment 2,we found that the interaction between emotion type and arm position was still significant.Even when the additional variables of motion amplitude were removed,gestures still had an effect on emotional face recognition,and arm position had a greater impact than hand opening and closing.The results of Experiment 3 showed that emotion type had significant interaction with articulation and arm position.When the emotional information of faces was ambiguous,the arm position still had an effect on emotional face recognition.Experiment 4 indicated that the interaction between emotion type and articulation was significant,and the main effect of arm position was significant.Primary school students and college students were consistent in regard to the effects of gesture on emotional face recognition,and primary school students were more affected by gesture.This study shows that the effects of gesture on emotional face recognition mainly focuses on arm position changes,which means that the greater the arm amplitude,the greater the effects.It explains that people are most sensitive to the emotional meanings conveyed by arms on daily social occasions,and this sensitivity is formed in childhood.