Abstract
Microexpression is a fleeting expression which appears when people try hard to suppress their true felt emotions. The ability to recognize microexpression is important for detecting deception. Can we improve the ability to recognize microexpression? If so, what happens during the recognition process? To answer the questions, we trained our participants (12 college students, mean age = 21.4, SD = 0.67, 6 females) on how to recognize microexpression (happiness, anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust) following the paradigm used by Ekman (Microexpression training tool, Paul Ekman Group), the gain scores were calculated for each participant. The participants were asked to recognize the same spontaneous microexpressions and sandwiched expressions (artificial microexpressions) twice before and after the training. Meanwhile, an eye tracker from SMI (RED 250) recorded eye-movements of participants at 250 Hz. The results found that the training was effective (the gain score was significantly greater than zero), and the duration of fixation of the correct answers after training was significantly greater than that before training. Post training, participants showed changes in attention to the key features of emotional facial expressions (e.g., the mouth of happiness), which suggested that the improved emotion recognition is associated with changes in the way participants viewed facial expressions of emotion. In addition, the evidence showed that gender of participants has an effect on the recognition (recognition accuracy for females was 0.66, and 0.59 for males) and training outcomes (gain score of females was 23.8%, and 17.1% for males).
Acknowledgement: National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.31460251) Project of Social Sciences in Jiangxi Province (No. 18JY24)