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Published on: January 19, 2024
Effects of the duration of expressions on the recognition of microexpressions
Xun-bing Shen1, Qi Wu, Xiao-lan Fu
1State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the duration of expressions on the recognition of microexpressions, which are closely related to deception.
Methods:
In two experiments, participants were briefly (from 20 to 300 ms) shown one of six basic expressions and then were asked to identify the expression.
Results:
The results showed that the participants' performance in recognition of microexpressions increased with the duration of the expressions, reaching a turning point at 200 ms before levelling off. The results also indicated that practice could improve the participants' performance.
Conclusions:
The results of this study suggest that the proper upper limit of the duration of microexpressions might be around 1/5 of a second and confirmed that the ability to recognize microexpressions can be enhanced with practice.
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