Abstract
The present study is a preliminary research for developing an experimental tool and a technique for determining how psychiatric patients recognize emotions from facial expressions. We used a Noh mask as a stimulus face, because changes in the angle of the view of the Noh mask cause the changes in the facial impressions. We proposed a fuzzy reasoning model for selecting the Noh mask which expressed the emotions caused by several situations, and we verified the validity of the model through an experiment. Another experiment showed that the facial impressions of the Noh mask depended on mainly the shapes of both the eyes and the mouth, and that the angle of mask and the shadow of the mask had a little effect on the facial impressions.
