The face of time: Temporal cues in facial expressions of emotion

Results of studies reported her-e indicate that humans are attuned to temporal cues in facial expressions of emotion. The experimental tusk required subjects to reproduce the actual progression of a target person's spontaneous expression (i.e., onset to offset) from a scrambled set of photographs. Each photograph depicted a segment of the expression that corresponded to approximately 67 ms in real time. Results of two experiments indicated that (a) individuals could detect extremely subtle dynamic cues in a facial expression and could utilize these cites to reproduce the proper temporal progression of the display at above-chance levels of accuracy; (b) women performed significantly better than men on the task designed to assess this ability; (c) individuals were most sensitive to the temporal characteristics of the early stages of an expression; and (d) accuracy was inversely related to the amount of time allotted Soi the task. The latter finding may reflect the relative involvement of(error-prone) cognitively mediated or strategic processes in what is normally a relatively automatic, nonconscious process.