The role of facial coloration in emotion disambiguation.

Previous research has demonstrated that some pairs of emotion expressions are confusing to observers because they share common facial-muscular expressive features. Recent research has suggested that another expressive feature, facial coloration, can facilitate the disambiguation of these emotion expressions. The current work tests this hypothesis by presenting participants with pairs of ambiguous emotion expressions with varying facial coloration, then assessing perceived emotion via continuous ratings and categorizations. The results demonstrated that facial coloration can influence perceived emotion within the emotion pairs of anger-disgust (Experiment 1), surprise-fear (Experiments 2a and 2b), and tearful sadness-happiness (Experiment 3). Further, this influence contributed to emotion disambiguation nonuniformly between emotion pairs. Implications discussed include the role of facial coloration in emotion perception, conceptualizations of emotion categories, and the use of posed facial expression stimuli in emotion research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).