Abstract
A recent revolutionary theory of color vision suggests that seeing facial skin color improves emotion recognition. Depending on an individuals emotional state, the quantity of blood and its oxygenation under the skin may vary, which causes subtle changes in the skin color and especially in the face. According to Mark Changizi and colleagues, specific color information in the skin is thought to be picked up by other co-specifics as signals of specific emotional states. To investigate whether color information affects emotion recognition, we enhanced facial images representing basic emotional expressions like happiness, sadness, anger and fear with colors that were either congruent or incongruent with the presented emotional expression (according to Changizi s model). Specifically, we measured behavioral and pupillary responses in thirty five participants while they performed an emotional expression recognition task while viewing faces of strangers on a computer screen and while their eye pupils were monitored by use of an eye-tracker. We predicted that in the congruent condition, participants performance would be improved when exposed to color-enhanced images than to their original versions. Respectively, their ability to recognize emotions should worsen while detecting emotions in the incongruent facial images. The findings did not fully support the hypotheses; however, there were some indications that congruent and incongruent conditions differed in both accuracy and response times, as well as in pupillary changes, that was consistent with the idea that facial skin plays a role in the recognition of emotional expressions. Finally, a standard color vision test (FM100) revealed that participants with better color vision also had higher accuracy in the task, indicating that seeing in color can be beneficial for the successful recognition of emotions.