Abstract
Adults show remarkable individual variation in the ability to detect felt enjoyment in smiles based on the Duchenne marker (Action Unit 6). It has been hypothesized that perceptual and attentional factors (possibly correlated to autistic-like personality traits in the normative range) play a major role in determining individual differences in recognition performance. Here, this hypothesis was tested in a sample of 100 young adults. Eye-tracking methodology was employed to assess patterns of visual attention during a smile recognition task. Results indicate that neither perceptual–attentional factors nor autistic-like personality traits contribute appreciably to individual differences in smile recognition.
Highlights
A smiling face does not always signal the experience of enjoyable emotions; people smile for many different reasons, for example to regulate conversation (Ekman, 2001), to mask other emotional states, or to manipulate and deceive others (Ekman and Friesen, 1982; Ekman et al, 1988)
The analysis of visual attention (EMI) showed that, on average, participants looked significantly longer at the eye region compared to the mouth region: the mean eye–mouth index (EMI) was 0.65, and was significantly different from 0.50 [t(99) = 7.05, p < 0.001; see Table 1], i.e., the value indicating that gaze is distributed between the eye region and the mouth region
Post hoc comparisons revealed that EMI was significantly lower in AU0 smiles compared to smiles with Action Unit 6 (AU6) (p < 0.001) and
Summary
A smiling face does not always signal the experience of enjoyable emotions; people smile for many different reasons, for example to regulate conversation (Ekman, 2001), to mask other emotional states (e.g., anger or sadness), or to manipulate and deceive others (Ekman and Friesen, 1982; Ekman et al, 1988). Normal adults usually perform at ceiling level when asked to distinguish between “basic” emotional expressions (see Ekman, 2001, 2006; Suzuki et al, 2006). We still know very little about the factors accounting for individual variation This is unfortunate, as a better understanding of individual differences would help clarify the cognitive processes underlying emotion recognition and shed light on their real impact in ecological contexts This is unfortunate, as a better understanding of individual differences would help clarify the cognitive processes underlying emotion recognition and shed light on their real impact in ecological contexts (for example, do people keep track of who is better at recognizing emotional expression? What are the social benefits or costs of being a skilled expression “reader”? Does emotion recognition ability covary with other cognitive and personality traits? And so on)
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