Although emotion expressions are typically dynamic and include the whole person, much emotion recognition research uses static, posed facial expressions. In this study, we created a stimulus set of dynamic, naturalistic expressions drawn from professional tennis matches to determine whether movement would result in better recognition. We examined participants’ judgments of static versus dynamic expressions when viewing an isolated face, an isolated body, or a whole person. Dynamic expressions increased recognition of whether the player had won or lost the point. In addition, recognition improved when the whole person was presented as opposed to only the face or body. However, overall recognition of wins and losses was poor, with recognition for isolated faces being poorer than chance for winning players. Our findings highlight the importance of incorporating dynamic stimuli and support previous research showing that recognition of naturalistic expressions differs greatly from the commonly-used posed and isolated facial expressions of emotion. Using a wider range of naturalistic stimuli should be incorporated into future research to better understand how emotion recognition functions in daily life.

尽管情绪表达通常是动态的并且包括整个人，但许多情绪识别研究使用静态的、摆姿势的面部表情。在这项研究中，我们从职业网球比赛中创建了一组动态、自然的表达刺激，以确定运动是否会导致更好的识别。我们检查了参与者在查看孤立的面孔、孤立的身体或整个人时对静态与动态表情的判断。动态表情增加了对玩家是赢了还是输了点的认识。此外，当呈现整个人而不是仅呈现面部或身体时，识别能力得到提高。然而，对输赢的整体认知度较差，对孤立面孔的认知度低于获胜玩家的机会。我们的研究结果强调了结合动态刺激的重要性，并支持先前的研究表明对自然表情的识别与常用的姿势和孤立的情绪面部表情有很大不同。使用更广泛的自然刺激应该被纳入未来的研究，以更好地了解情绪识别在日常生活中的作用。