Differences In Emotion Perception Research Articles

Age and sex differences in emotion perception are influenced by emotional category and communication channel.

Sex differences in verbal and nonverbal emotion processing in older individuals are underexplored despite declining emotional performance with age. This study aimed to investigate the nature of sex differences in age-related decline in emotion perception, exploring modulatory effects on communication channels and emotion categories. Seventy-three older adults (43 female participants, aged 60-89 years) and 74 younger adults (37 female participants, aged 18-30 years) completed a task to recognize basic emotions (i.e., anger, happiness, neutrality, sadness) expressed by female or male encoders through verbal (i.e., semantic) and nonverbal (i.e., facial and prosodic) channels. Female participants consistently demonstrated an overall advantage in emotion perception and expression across both age cohorts. In older adults, this superiority was heightened in decoding angry and sad faces, as well as angry prosody and happy and sad semantics. However, older individuals exhibited decreased sensitivities to angry semantics, sad prosody, and neutral prosody from female encoders, whereas they showed heightened sensitivities to happy faces from female encoders and angry faces from male encoders. Both older and younger adults displayed age-related changes in sex interactions specific to emotional categories and channels. But neither own-sex nor opposite-sex bias was systematically observed across the two age groups. These results suggest that explicit emotion processing involves an intricate integration of individual and contextual differences, with significant age and sex interplay linked to specific emotions and channels. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Age and Sex Differences in Emotion Perception are Influenced by Emotional Category and Communication Channel

Supplemental Material for Age and Sex Differences in Emotion Perception are Influenced by Emotional Category and Communication Channel

Perception and Expression of Anger and Shame: Genders and Occupational Differences

In this article, the authors analyzed previous research about differences in emotion perception and expression and found out that gender and occupation are two important contributors in shaping emotion perception and expression. Previous studies suggested that females have a great ability to distinguish and avoid anger, while males show great frequency in expressing anger. At the same time, individuals who are at the top or the bottom of society are more inclined to get angry, while the middle classes are more likely to feel shame. To get a deeper insight into the impact of gender and occupation on emotionsanger, and shame, the authors designed an experiment that needs respondents to finish two sets of questionnairesone is aimed to show anger frequency, the other one is used to show shame frequency. Results will be analyzed based on participants gender and occupation, which enables the authors to clarify the relationships between emotionsanger and shameand differences in gender and occupation.

Young and old persons' subjective feelings when facing with a non-human computer-graphics-based agent's emotional responses in consideration of differences in emotion perception

Virtual agents (computer-graphics-based agents) have been developed for many purposes such as supporting the social life, mental care, education, and entertainment of both young and old people individuals. Promoting affective communication between young/old users and agents requires clarifying subjective feelings induced by an agent's expressions. However, an emotional response model of agents to induce positive feelings has not been fully understood due to differences in emotion perception between young and old adults. We investigated subjective feelings induced when facing with a non-human computer-graphics-based agent's emotional responses in consideration of differences of emotion perception between young adults and old adults. To emphasize the differences in emotion perception, the agent's expressions were developed by adopting exaggerated human expressions. The differences in their emotion perception of happy, sadness, and angry between young and old participants were then identified through a preliminary experiment. Considering the differences in emotion perception, induced feelings when facing with the agent's expressions were analyzed from the three types of emotion sources of the participant, agent, and other, which was defined as subject and responsibility of induced emotion. The subjective feelings were evaluated using a subjective rating task with 139 young and 211 old participants. The response of the agent that most induced positive feelings was happy when participants felt happy, and that was sad when participants felt sad, regardless emotion sources in both young and old groups. The response that most induced positive feelings was sad when participants felt angry and emotion sources were participant and the agent, and that was angry when the emotion source was other. The emotion types of the response to induce most positive feelings were the same between the young and old participants, and the way to induce most positive feelings was not always to mimic the emotional expressions, which is a typical tendency of human responses. These findings suggest that a common agent response model can be developed for young and old people by combining an emotional mimicry model with a response model to induce positive feelings in users and promote natural and affective communication, considering age characteristics of emotion perception.

Sex differences in social cognition among individuals with schizophrenia and in healthy control participants: a secondary analysis of published data.

Sex differences are present among individuals experiencing schizophrenia. Whether these differences extend to social cognition is unclear. In this study, we investigated sex differences in emotion perception, socialperception and theory of mind (ToM). We examined sex differences between males and females with schizophrenia on five social cognitive tests. Healthy male and female control participants were included to examine if any sex difference was illness-specific. Emotion perception was measured with Pictures of Facial Affect (PFA) and Emotion in Biological Motion (EmoBio); social perception with the Relationships Across Domains Test (RAD); and ToM with the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC) and Hinting Task. Two-way analyses of variance revealed overall group differences for all tests, with healthy controls outperforming individuals with schizophrenia. Significant sex effects were present for PFA and Hinting Task. There were no significant interaction effects. Within-group independent samples t-tests yielded one significant sex difference, i.e., among healthy controls for PFA. Females had better facial emotion perception than males. This sex difference was statistically significant among healthy controls and medium-large among individuals experiencing schizophrenia. There were no significant sex differences for other social cognitive domains. The study did not find evidence for a general female advantage in social cognition.

Perceptual integration of bodily and facial emotion cues in chimpanzees and humans.

For highly visual species like primates, facial and bodily emotion expressions play a crucial role in emotion perception. However, most research focuses on facial expressions, while the perception of bodily cues is still poorly understood. Using a novel comparative priming eye-tracking design, we examined whether our close primate relatives, the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and humans infer emotions from bodily cues through subsequent perceptual integration with facial expressions. In experiment 1, we primed chimpanzees with videos of bodily movements of unfamiliar conspecifics engaged in social activities of opposite valence (play and fear) against neutral control scenes to examine attentional bias toward succeeding congruent or incongruent facial expressions. In experiment 2, we assessed the same attentional bias in humans yet using stimuli showing unfamiliar humans. In experiment 3, humans watched the chimpanzee stimuli of experiment 1, to examine cross-species emotion perception. Chimpanzees exhibited a persistent fear-related attention bias but did not associate bodily with congruent facial cues. In contrast, humans prioritized conspecifics' congruent facial expressions (matching bodily scenes) over incongruent ones (mismatching). Nevertheless, humans exhibited no congruency effect when viewing chimpanzee stimuli, suggesting difficulty in cross-species emotion perception. These results highlight differences in emotion perception, with humans being greatly affected by fearful and playful bodily cues and chimpanzees being strongly drawn toward fearful expressions, regardless of the preceding bodily priming cue. These data advance our understanding of the evolution of emotion signaling and the presence of distinct perceptual patterns in hominids.

People in rice-farming cultures perceive emotions more accurately

Are people in interdependent cultures more accurate at perceiving people's emotional expressions? One problem with testing this question is that people tend to be more accurate at perceiving emotions of people of their own ethnic group. That makes it impossible to test East-West cultural differences using the same emotion pictures. We got around this problem by testing for cultural differences between southern and northern China. Southern China traditionally farmed rice, which requires more interdependence than the wheat farming of northern China. Paying more attention to people's emotions may have been useful in rice cultures because farmers had to manage shared irrigation networks and exchange labor more than wheat farmers. In Study 1, students who had grown up in rice-farming provinces guessed people's emotions in the Mind in the Eyes test more accurately than people who had grown up in wheat-farming provinces. In Study 2, we tested students from 13 prefectures (similar to US counties) in a single province along China's rice-wheat border. People from the rice side of the border perceived emotions more accurately than people from the wheat side. These results connect a long-term ecological cause (rice farming) to a modern psychological outcome (emotion perception). These results also offer an explanation for broader cultural differences in emotion perception.

Absence of age differences in emotion perception and gaze patterns using a contextually rich film-based assessment.

Age differences in emotion perception are now well documented. However, a key limitation of many studies in this literature is the reliance on highly artificial tasks that lack context and consequently have poor ecological validity. This study reports two separate experiments that investigated age differences in emotion perception abilities using a highly contextualised film-based assessment along with a traditional emotion perception task. Experiment 2 additionally included a middle-aged sample and an assessment of eye-gaze patterns to the emotional films. The inclusion of eye-tracking in Experiment 2 was motivated by the fact that older adults consistently show visual biases to static emotion stimuli, yet it remains unclear whether biases also emerge in response to dynamic contextualised emotion stimuli. Experiment 1 identified age effects recognising displays of anger in the traditional emotion perception task but no age differences emerged on the film-based task. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2 with significant group differences on the traditional emotion perception task but no age differences on the film-based task. Experiment 2 also showed that there were no age differences in gaze patterns to these stimuli, showing for the first time that age-related visual biases to emotion stimuli may be task dependent. These findings highlight the fact that task-related features play a key role in the evaluation of age effects in emotion perception.

Individual Differences in Perception of Emotion Induced by Speech Stimuli among People with Visual Disabilities

Individual Differences in Perception of Emotion Induced by Speech Stimuli among People with Visual Disabilities

The Influence of Emotional Awareness on Time Perception: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials

Prior studies found that participants overestimated both negative and positive emotional stimuli, compared with neutral emotion. This phenomenon can be explained by the “arousal mechanism.” Participants demonstrated individual differences in emotion perception. In other words, high emotional awareness resulted in high emotional arousal, and vice versa. This study extended existing findings by exploring the influence of emotional awareness on time perception in a temporal generalization task, while recording electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. The findings revealed that in the positive emotion condition, the high emotional awareness group made more overestimations, compared with the low emotional awareness group. However, no difference was observed in the neutral or negative emotion conditions. Moreover, the event-related potential (ERP) results showed that in the positive emotion condition, the high awareness group elicited larger vertex positive potential (VPP) amplitudes, compared with that of the low awareness group. However, no such differences were observed in the neutral and negative emotion conditions. Moreover, the contingent negative variation (CNV) (200–300, 300–490 ms) component showed that in the positive emotion, the amplitudes of the high awareness group were larger than that of the low awareness group; however, they did not show differences in the neutral condition. The findings of this study suggest that high emotional awareness produces higher physiological arousal; moreover, when participants were required to estimate the time duration of emotional pictures, they tended to make higher time overestimation. Thus, our results support the relationship between emotional awareness and time perception.

Age Similarity in Emotion Perception Based on Eye Gaze Manipulation

The purpose of this study was to examine age differences in emotion perception as a function of emotion type and gaze direction. Old and young adult participants were presented with facial images showing happiness, sadness, fear, anger and disgust while having their eyes tracked. The image stimuli included a manipulation of eye gaze. Half of the facial expressions had a directed eye gaze while the other half showed an averted gaze. A 2 (age) x 2 (gaze) x 5 (emotion) repeated measures ANOVA was used to analyze emotion perception scores and fixation to eye and mouth regions of the face. The manipulation of eye gaze yielded more age similarities than differences in emotion perception. Overall, we did not detect age differences in recognition ability. However, we found that certain emotion categories differentially impacted emotion perception. Interestingly, we observed that an averted gaze led to beneficial performance for fear and disgust faces. Additionally, participants spent more time fixating on the eye regions of sad facial expressions. We discuss how naturalistic manipulations of various facial features could impact age-related differences (or similarities) in emotion perception.

Age differences in emotion perception in a multiple target setting: An eye-tracking study.

Research focusing on the association between age and emotion perception has revealed inconsistent findings, with some support for an age-related positivity effect, as predicted by socioemotional selectivity theory. We used the mood-of-the-crowd (MoC) task to investigate whether older adults judge a crowd consisting of happy and angry expressions to be dominated by happy faces more frequently. The task was to decide whether an array of faces included more angry or more happy faces. Accuracy, response times, and gaze movements were analyzed to test the hypothesis, derived from socioemotional selectivity theory, that age would be associated with a bias toward judging crowds as happy, and with longer and more numerous fixations on happy expressions. Seventy-six participants took part in the study representing 3 different age groups (young, middle-aged, old). Contrary to the hypothesis, older participants more often judged the emotional crowd to be angry compared with younger participants. Furthermore, whereas fixations were longer for happy faces than for angry faces in younger adults, this difference was not present in older adults. A decline in inhibitory processing in older adults as well as higher cognitive demands of the task are discussed as possible explanations for these findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Categorical and Dimensional Ratings of Emotional Speech: Behavioral Findings From the Morgan Emotional Speech Set

Purpose Emotion classification for auditory stimuli typically employs 1 of 2 approaches (discrete categories or emotional dimensions). This work presents a new emotional speech set, compares these 2 classification methods for emotional speech stimuli, and emphasizes the need to consider the entire communication model (i.e., the talker, message, and listener) when studying auditory emotion portrayal and perception. Method Emotional speech from male and female talkers was evaluated using both categorical and dimensional rating methods. Ten young adult listeners (ages 19-28 years) evaluated stimuli recorded in 4 emotional speaking styles (Angry, Calm, Happy, and Sad). Talker and listener factors were examined for potential influences on emotional ratings using categorical and dimensional rating methods. Listeners rated stimuli by selecting an emotion category, rating the activation and pleasantness, and indicating goodness of category fit. Results Discrete ratings were generally consistent with dimensional ratings for speech, with accuracy for emotion recognition well above chance. As stimuli approached dimensional extremes of activation and pleasantness, listeners were more confident in their category selection, indicative of a hybrid approach to emotion classification. Female talkers were rated as more activated than male talkers, and female listeners gave higher ratings of activation compared to male listeners, confirming gender differences in emotion perception. Conclusion A hybrid model for auditory emotion classification is supported by the data. Talker and listener factors, such as gender, were found to impact the ratings of emotional speech and must be considered alongside stimulus factors in the design of future studies of emotion.

The neural representation of facial-emotion categories reflects conceptual structure

Humans reliably categorize configurations of facial actions into specific emotion categories, leading some to argue that this process is invariant between individuals and cultures. However, growing behavioral evidence suggests that factors such as emotion-concept knowledge may shape the way emotions are visually perceived, leading to variability-rather than universality-in facial-emotion perception. Understanding variability in emotion perception is only emerging, and the neural basis of any impact from the structure of emotion-concept knowledge remains unknown. In a neuroimaging study, we used a representational similarity analysis (RSA) approach to measure the correspondence between the conceptual, perceptual, and neural representational structures of the six emotion categories Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Sadness, and Surprise. We found that subjects exhibited individual differences in their conceptual structure of emotions, which predicted their own unique perceptual structure. When viewing faces, the representational structure of multivoxel patterns in the right fusiform gyrus was significantly predicted by a subject's unique conceptual structure, even when controlling for potential physical similarity in the faces themselves. Finally, cross-cultural differences in emotion perception were also observed, which could be explained by individual differences in conceptual structure. Our results suggest that the representational structure of emotion expressions in visual face-processing regions may be shaped by idiosyncratic conceptual understanding of emotion categories.

Projecting emotions from artworks to maps using neural style transfer

Abstract. Recent advances in deep learning have facilitated the exchange of styles and textures between input images to create unique synthesised outputs. This paper assesses the applicability of neural style transfer to cartography and evaluates to what degree emotions attached to input images can be preserved in maps co-created by human and algorithm. As a source of emotions we utilized personal paintings created during a workshop with international artists at the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe in August 2018. The neural style transfer was used as a tool to transfer the characteristics of the artworks onto the map. Differences in emotion perception between human-made textures and generated maps were assessed with an online survey completed by 1187 users. The results confirmed that emotional descriptions remain the same before and after the procedure of neural style transfer. The users perceived artificially generated maps as interesting and visually pleasing artefacts. Artworks with variety of line, point and surface depictions were the most suitable algorithm inputs and achieved better visual results in representing the map content. After analysing the neural style transfer technique and identifying its limitations for cartographic style and map content, we conclude with plausible directions for future research.

Curriculum Learning for Speech Emotion Recognition From Crowdsourced Labels

This study introduces a method to design a curriculum for machine-learning to maximize the efficiency during the training process of deep neural networks (DNNs) for speech emotion recognition. Previous studies in other machine-learning problems have shown the benefits of training a classifier following a curriculum where samples are gradually presented in increasing level of difficulty. For speech emotion recognition, the challenge is to establish a natural order of difficulty in the training set to create the curriculum. We address this problem by assuming that ambiguous samples for humans are also ambiguous for computers. Speech samples are often annotated by multiple evaluators to account for differences in emotion perception across individuals. While some sentences with clear emotional content are consistently annotated, sentences with more ambiguous emotional content present important disagreement between individual evaluations. We propose to use the disagreement between evaluators as a measure of difficulty for the classification task. We propose metrics that quantify the inter-evaluation agreement to define the curriculum for regression problems and binary and multi-class classification problems. The experimental results consistently show that relying on a curriculum based on agreement between human judgments leads to statistically significant improvements over baselines trained without a curriculum.

Sex differences during emotion processing are dependent on the menstrual cycle phase

Sex differences in the neural processing of emotion are of special interest considering that mood and anxiety disorders predominant in females. However, these sex-related differences were typically studied without considering the hormonal status of female subjects, although emotion processing in the brain was shown to differ between phases of the menstrual cycle. In this functional MRI study, we demonstrated the influence of the menstrual cycle phase on sex differences in brain activity and functional connectivity during negative and positive emotions, using two different paradigms: emotion perception and emotion experience. Twenty naturally cycling healthy women without premenstrual symptoms were scanned twice: during the mid-follicular and late-luteal menstrual phases, and compared to a matched group of twenty healthy men. During negative emotion perception, men showed increased neural activity in the right hippocampal formation relative to women in the mid-follicular phase, and increased activity in the right cerebellum relative to women in the late-luteal phase. During experience of amusement, reduced putamen-ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and putamen-dorsomedial prefrontal cortex functional connectivity were observed for women in the late-luteal phase relative to men and associated with levels of sex hormones. These neural and hormonal findings were complemented by behavioral reports of reduced amusement and increased sadness in late-luteal women. Our results demonstrate menstrual phase-dependent sex differences in emotion perception and experience and may suggest a biological tendency for a deficient experience of pleasure and reward during the late-luteal phase. These findings may further shed light on the underlying pathophysiology of premenstrual dysphoric disorder.

Emotional arousal deficit or emotional regulation bias? An electrophysiological study of age-related differences in emotion perception

ABSTRACTBackground/Study context: Adult age differences in emotion processing have been attributed to age-related decline in earlier emotional perception and age-related bias in later emotional regulation. Yet, the relationship between the processes of early emotion perception and bias in emotional regulation and their influence on behavioral outcomes remains unclear. Event-related potentials (ERPs) have the temporal precision to allow for the online measure of neurophysiological activity and provide potential insight into the complex dynamics of emotion processing and aging.Methods: ERPs were used as the primary measure to examine the hypotheses that younger adults will differ in emotional arousal and emotional bias as represented by the early P1 waveform and later P3 waveform, respectively. Thirty-two younger and older adults (16 each) performed a facial emotion discrimination task in which they identified standardized angry, happy, or neutral expressions of faces from the NimStim database.Results: Younger adults showed a greater P1 ERP for angry faces relative to happy faces at parietal channels, while older adults did not exhibit any emotional modulation of the P1. In contrast, both younger and older adults showed a greater late P3 ERP for angry faces compared to happy faces.Conclusion: The authors’ results provide evidence for an age-related deficit in early emotion perception and autonomic arousal. Younger adults, but not older adults, exhibited a pattern of neurophysiological activity believed to reflect preconscious and reflexive identification of threat. Despite these age group differences in early emotion processing, younger and older adults did not exhibit differences in neurophysiological processes believed to reflect emotion regulation.

Age-related differences in emotion matching are limited to low intensity expressions

ABSTRACTMulti-label tasks confound age differences in perceptual and cognitive processes. We examined age differences in emotion perception with a technique that did not require verbal labels. Participants matched the emotion expressed by a target to two comparison stimuli, one neutral and one emotional. Angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, and sad facial expressions of varying intensity were used. Although older adults took longer to respond than younger adults, younger adults only outmatched older adults for the lowest intensity disgust and fear expressions. Some participants also completed an identity matching task in which target stimuli were matched on personal identity instead of emotion. Although irrelevant to the judgment, expressed emotion still created interference. All participants were less accurate when the apparent difference in expressive intensity of the matched stimuli was large, suggesting that salient emotion cues increased difficulty of identity matching. Age differences in emotion perception were limited to very low intensity expressions.

Gender differences in emotion perception and self-reported emotional intelligence: A test of the emotion sensitivity hypothesis.

Previous meta-analyses and reviews on gender differences in emotion recognition have shown a small to moderate female advantage. However, inconsistent evidence from recent studies has raised questions regarding the implications of different methodologies, stimuli, and samples. In the present research based on a community sample of more than 5000 participants, we tested the emotional sensitivity hypothesis, stating that women are more sensitive to perceive subtle, i.e. low intense or ambiguous, emotion cues. In addition, we included a self-report emotional intelligence test in order to examine any discrepancy between self-perceptions and actual performance for both men and women. We used a wide range of stimuli and models, displaying six different emotions at two different intensity levels. In order to better tap sensitivity for subtle emotion cues, we did not use a forced choice format, but rather intensity measures of different emotions. We found no support for the emotional sensitivity account, as both genders rated the target emotions as similarly intense at both levels of stimulus intensity. Men, however, more strongly perceived non-target emotions to be present than women. In addition, we also found that the lower scores of men in self-reported EI was not related to their actual perception of target emotions, but it was to the perception of non-target emotions.