1981 Volume 8 Issue 9 Pages 1-20
In order to investigate perceptual dimensions of facial expressions, three-way multidimensional scaling methods were applied to the analysis of two types of judgment data. That is, dissimilarity judgments among facial expressions and rating judgments of each face on 20 emotion-term scales were obtained in experiments, and analyzed by the scaling methods which yielded uniquely oriented configurations. The faces used in the experiments consisted of seventeen schematic facial expressions constructed by combinations of different curvatures of the mouth and eyes. The results successfully exposed two perceptual dimensions, which were interpreted as friendliness-unfriendliness and high activation — low activation. And it was clarified that these dimensions were fairly consistent over the different data types and scaling methods used in the present study.
