The effect of dynamics on identifying basic emotions from synthetic and natural faces

The identification of basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise) has been studied widely from pictures of facial expressions. Until recently, the role of dynamic information in identifying facial emotions has received little attention. There is evidence that dynamics improves the identification of basic emotions from synthetic (computer-animated) facial expressions [Wehrle, T., Kaiser, S., Schmidt, S., Scherer, K.R., 2000. Studying dynamic models of facial expression of emotion using synthetic animated faces. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (1), 105–119.]; however, similar result has not been confirmed with natural human faces. We compared the identification of basic emotions from both natural and synthetic dynamic vs. static facial expressions in 54 subjects. We found no significant differences in the identification of static and dynamic expressions from natural faces. In contrast, some synthetic dynamic expressions were identified much more accurately than static ones. This effect was evident only with synthetic facial expressions whose static displays were non-distinctive. Our results show that dynamics does not improve the identification of already distinctive static facial displays. On the other hand, dynamics has an important role for identifying subtle emotional expressions, particularly from computer-animated synthetic characters.