Recognizing Emotions on Static and Animated Avatar Faces

Participants were shown static or animated versions of a FACS-compliant avatar face in the work of P. Ekman and W.V. Friesen (1978), and asked to identify the emotion that the face was displaying. In the first version of the face, happiness, sadness, and surprise were all recognized at high rates (80% or more) whatever the stimulus type, while anger and disgust had low recognition rates. The neutral face was not well recognized when viewed as a static image, but was recognized significantly more often when animated. In a second experiment, small changes made to "tweak" the neutral and angry faces were only partially successful. About half the people recognized the static angry face; far fewer recognized the animated version; and most people wrongly identified the neutral face, both in its static and its animated version. More surprisingly, the recognition rates for happiness, sadness and surprise dropped significantly during the second experiment, for both the static and the animated faces. This may be due to changes in the way the stimuli were presented between the first and the second experiment. These results suggest that people are sensitive to small, seemingly innocuous changes in the presentation of avatar faces