This study investigates the facial structural variables involved in the recognition of facial expressions of emotion. While some studies using schematic faces have reported the structural variables of “slantedness” and “curvedness/openness”, subsequent studies, employing both real face images and schematic faces, have indicated three variables. In order to further examine this issue, this study created new schematic faces to be used as stimuli that cover the variability in the real facial expressions used in Yamada, Matsuda, Watari, & Suenaga (1993). Participants were asked to judge 102 face stimuli in terms of six basic emotion categories (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, and disgust). A canonical discriminant analysis, with displacements for nine feature points as independent variables and category judgment frequencies as dependent variables, revealed the three structural variables of “slantedness of eyebrows and eyes”, “slantedness of lips” and “curvedness/openness”, which match those in Yamada et al. (1993). These results indicate that emotion judgments for both real and schematic faces are based on the same facial structural variables.
View full abstract