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Participants judged which of seven facial expressions (neutrality, happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, fear, and disgust) were displayed by a set of 280 faces corresponding to 20 female and 20 male models of the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database (Lundqvist, Flykt, & Öhman, 1998). Each face was presented under free-viewing conditions (to 63 participants) and also for 25, 50, 100, 250, and 500 msec (to 160 participants), to examine identification thresholds. Measures of identification accuracy, types of errors, and reaction times were obtained for each expression. In general, happy faces were identified more accurately, earlier, and faster than other faces, whereas judgments of fearful faces were the least accurate, the latest, and the slowest. Norms for each face and expression regarding level of identification accuracy, errors, and reaction times may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.
Faces and facial expressions of emotion are special types of stimuli, with high social and biological relevance. Accurate recognition effaces and their expressions allows a person not only to identify other people, but also to understand their states, needs, and intentions. This enables the observer to behave in a way that optimizes (or avoids) social interaction. There is evidence of automatic perception of affective facial expressions (Stenberg, Wiking, & Dabi, 1998), with low perceptual thresholds and wide attentional span (Calvo & Esteves, 2005). Extensive reviews and thorough discussions about the reduced processing requirements, or enhanced sensory processing, of affective facial expressions, and the neural mechanisms involved, have been provided recently by Compton (2003), Pessoa (2005), Palermo and Rhodes (2007), and Vuilleumier and Pourtois (2007). This special cognitive capacity for facial processing is supported by neural mechanisms that specialize in the recognition effaces (Farah, 2000) and by neural mechanisms that are especially sensitive to early detection and discrimination of emotional expressions (see, e.g., Morris, Öhman, & Dolan, 1998; Schupp et al., 2004).
Given the adaptive importance of affective facial expressions, it is understandable that considerable behavioral and neuropsychological research has been devoted to the study of emotional face processing (see Adolphs, 2002). Standardized sets of emotional faces have been used by researchers, with the Pictures of Facial Affect (PFA-Ekman & Friesen, 1976) used in the majority of studies. Although very valuable, this set of pictures contains photographs of only five males...