Facial expression, size, and clutter: Inferences from movie structure to emotion judgments and back

The perception of facial expressions and objects at a distance are entrenched psychological research venues, but their intersection is not. We were motivated to study them together because of their joint importance in the physical composition of popular movies—shots that show a larger image of a face typically have shorter durations than those in which the face is smaller. For static images, we explore the time it takes viewers to categorize the valence of different facial expressions as a function of their visual size. In two studies, we find that smaller faces take longer to categorize than those that are larger, and this pattern interacts with local background clutter. More clutter creates crowding and impedes the interpretation of expressions for more distant faces but not proximal ones. Filmmakers at least tacitly know this. In two other studies, we show that contemporary movies lengthen shots that show smaller faces, and even more so with increased clutter.