The Role of Temperament in the Perception of Morphed Animate/Inanimate Facial Images with Emotional Expressions of Disgust/Happiness: A Study based on Signal Detection Theory

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of temperamental differences in people's perceptual bias in the two dimensions of animacy (alive/non-alive) and expression of facial emotion (happy/disgust) in morphed images under ambiguous conditions.

Four groups, each group consisting of 20 people aged 22-35, with emotional temperament of high and low activation and high and low inhibition, were selected based on Affective and Emotional Composite Temperament (AFECT) scale. Under the same conditions, they performed the task of morphed images in two dimensions of emotion and animacy. The findings were analyzed by t-test and Kruskal-Wallis in SPSS software version 26.

High vs. low activation and high vs. low inhibition temperamental groups are biased in the perception of morphed images with emotional expressions of disgust/happiness but not in animacy.

Temperament plays a role in perception of the morphed images with emotional expression of happiness/disgust, but it does not in the animacy dimension.