Research On Emotional Face Recognition Based On Mirror Neuron Theory

During the three years of the raging COVID-19 pandemic,the whole world has recognized the importance of wearing medical masks when facing the epidemic.However,wearing medical masks will cover most of our facial perceptual information,which brings new challenges for our face-to-face social interaction.Existing research has confirmed that wearing medical masks seriously affects our understanding of others’ psychological states and emotions.The activity of mirror neurons is regulated by both action observation and execution,and many psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists believe that the mirror neuron system is the physiological basis of perception-action coupling(Keysers,2009).This study examined the relative importance of facial perceptual information integrity(perception)and facial feedback(action)in emotional facial recognition by controlling the integrity of facial perceptual information and corresponding to the physiological basis of perception-action coupling theory of mirror neurons.In Experiment 1,the influence of facial perceptual information integrity on emotional facial recognition was studied using elderly people and children as subjects of the vulnerable groups in social interaction.The results of the experiment indicated that:(1)except for happy facial expressions,the performance of the elderly in the recognition of other emotional facial expressions was worse than that of children.The difference between the elderly and children can be explained by the elderly’s avoidance behavior towards negative emotional facial expressions,subconsciously refusing to accept negative stimuli;(2)the interaction between age and facial perceptual information integrity was marginally significant,under the condition of sunglasses obstruction and controlling the integrity of facial perceptual information,the accuracy of emotional facial recognition in children was significantly higher than that in the elderly,which may indicate that the elderly pay more attention to the perceptual information of the eye area in the process of emotional facial recognition.In Experiment 2,children were used as participants to investigate the relative importance of facial perceptual information integrity and facial feedback in recognizing emotional facial expressions.The study found that:(1)When the emotional facial expression images were presented for 2000 ms,the impact of facial perceptual information integrity on the accuracy of emotional facial expression recognition was greater than that of facial feedback,indicating that facial perceptual information integrity was more important.(2)The importance of perceptual information for the masked parts of the face and sunglasses in recognizing sad and surprised emotional facial expressions was similar.Perceptual information in the mouth area of the masked parts for recognizing happy,angry,and disgusted emotional facial expressions was more important,while perceptual information in the eye area of the sunglasses was more important for recognizing fearful emotional facial expressions.For neutral emotional facial expressions,the facial perceptual information from the sunglasses resulted in a higher accuracy rate of emotional facial expression recognition,indicating that perceptual information from the eye area could interfere with the recognition of neutral emotional facial expressions,causing participants to tend to identify them as other emotions.Sunglasses block out irrelevant interference information and deceptive information.(3)The confusion model showed that fearful emotional facial expressions were easily confused with surprised emotional facial expressions,possibly because the eye and mouth expressions of fearful and surprised emotional facial expressions tend to be similar.When recognizing emotional facial expressions with masked parts of the face and sunglasses,all types of emotional facial expressions were to some extent confused with neutral emotional facial expressions.(4)When recognizing surprised emotional facial expressions with the mask condition,the accuracy rate of emotional facial expressions with teeth clenching was significantly higher than that of emotional facial expressions with relaxed facial feedback,and the accuracy rate of emotional facial expressions with lip pursing was marginally higher than that of emotional facial expressions with relaxed facial feedback.The facial feedback operation of teeth clenching and lip pursing for surprised emotional facial expressions was inhibitory,which partly explained the effect of facial feedback on emotional facial expression recognition.