Аннотация:Face perception, especially the recognition of face emotion expressions, plays a crucial role in social communication. Psychophysical and neurophysiological evidence suggests that we have a specialized system for encoding face expressions. Two mechanisms may underlie the processes of expression’s encoding - feature and holistic processes. It has been shown that expression encoding depended more heavily on processing of configural or holistic information than on feature information (Thompson, 1980; Tanaka & Farah, 1993; Maurer et al., 2002). The aim of our study was to investigate the expression’s recognition of chimeric faces generated of two different universal emotions. We tested whether the subjects could identify these two expressions. If feature processing would be dominating then the recognition of face expressions should change negligible. On the contrary the dominance of holistic processing should change the recognition of face expressions heavily.The recognition of face expressions changed heavily when the expressions were combined of two different universal emotions. So, the process of expression encoding is driven not by special features – wideness of the eyes, the tilt of mouth corners and so on, but by all the information present in a face. Our results also demonstrate the complexity and sophistication of holistic mechanisms for expression processing.