Emotion expression modulates perception of animacy from faces

Article history: Received 13 July 2016 Revised 13 February 2017 Accepted 14 February 2017 Available online xxxx Discriminating real human faces from artificial can be achieved quickly and accurately by face-processing networks, but less is known about what stimulus qualities or interindividual differences in the perceiver might influence whether a face is perceived as being alive. In the present studies, morphed stimuli differing in levels of animacy were created. Participants made judgements about whether the face appeared animate at different levels along the morph continuum. The faces varied in terms of emotional expression (happy vs. neutral) and gender. Male faces were judged to be animate at a lower threshold (i.e., closer to the inanimate end of the continuum) than female faces. Animacy was also perceived more readily in faces with happy expressions than neutral. These effects were observed across two separate studies involving different participants and different sets of stimuli (animate faces morphed with dolls or those morphed with computer generated faces). Finally, the influence of interindividual variability in personality traits on animacy perception was examined. This revealed that an externally oriented cognitive style, a component of alexithymia, was associatedwith lower thresholds for perceiving animacy, for animate faces morphed with dolls. The findings are discussed in relation to interand intraindividual variability in animacy perception and social interaction. © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).