Effects of lip and eye color on the emotion categorization of facial expressions

Abstract

This study examined whether people's ability to recognize facial expressions is affected by manipulating the color of their lips or eyes. Participants comprised 100 Chinese adolescents (mean age = 13.79 years, SD = 1.06). The stimuli consisted of happy, neutral, and sad facial expressions, which were manipulated to have different lip or eye colors. Participants reacted to the images by indicating their perceived emotion. Performance speed and accuracy were assessed during the experiment. Results indicated that for happy and neutral expressions, the use of color significantly reduced reaction times, while the accuracy remained unchanged. Conversely, for sad expressions, reaction time was not affected by color, but all color categories exhibited reduced accuracy.