Investigating Effects of Image Blurring on Facial Emotion Recognition

Facial emotion recognition plays an important role in social interactions. Impairment in this area causes a deficit in individuals’ social competency. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the accuracy and speed of facial emotion recognition at different levels of image blurring in healthy participants. images of faces of all participants, displaying different emotions including happiness, sadness and anger along with neural expression in different levels of blurring, were viewed. They were instructed to detect the emotions accurately as soon as possible. the results show that the accuracy of recognition of happiness was significantly higher than that for negative emotions such as anger and sadness. The neutral expression was recognized to be worse than happiness and better than negative emotions. Sadness was less quickly and more accurately than anger. The more the image blurred, the more the recognition of accuracy and speed was reduced. the accuracy and speed recognition of different emotions diminish due to the increased level of image blurring. Happiness, along with neutral expression, when displayed in blurred images, are always recognized with greater accuracy and speed than negative emotions (sadness and anger).