Perception Of Emotional Expressions Research Articles

Is she still angry? Intact learning but no updating of facial expressions priors in autism.

Autistic people exhibit atypical use of prior information when processing simple perceptual stimuli; yet, it remains unclear whether and how these difficulties in using priors extend to complex social stimuli. Here, we compared autistic people without accompanying intellectual disability and nonautistic people in their ability to acquire an "emotional prior" of a facial expression and update this prior to a different facial expression of the same identity. Participants performed a two-interval same/different discrimination task between two facial expressions. To study the acquisition of the prior, we examined how discrimination was modified by the contraction of the perceived facial expressions toward the average of presented stimuli (i.e., regression to the mean). At first, facial expressions surrounded one average emotional prior (mostly sad or angry), and then the average switched (to mostly angry or sad, accordingly). Autistic people exhibited challenges in facial discrimination, and yet acquired the first prior, demonstrating typical regression-to-the-mean effects. However, unlike nonautistic people, autistic people did not update their perception to the second prior, suggesting they are less flexible in updating an acquired prior of emotional expressions. Our findings shed light on the perception of emotional expressions, one of the most pressing challenges in autism.

Facial expressions affect the memory of facial colors.

Facial color influences the perception of facial expressions, and emotional expressions bias how facial color is remembered. However, it remains unclear whether facial expressions affect daily facial color memory. The memory color effect demonstrates that knowledge about typical colors affects the perception of the actual color of given objects. To investigate the effect of facial color memory, we examined whether the memory color effect for faces varies depending on facial expression. We calculated the subjective achromatic point of the facial expression image stimulus and compared the degree to which it was shifted from the actual achromatic point between facial expression conditions. We hypothesized that if the memory of facial color is influenced by the facial expression color (e.g., anger is a warm color, fear is a cold color), then the subjective achromatic point would vary with facial expression. In Experiment 1, we recruited 13 participants who adjusted the color of facial expression stimuli (anger, neutral, and fear) and a banana stimulus to be achromatic. No significant differences in the subjective achromatic point between facial expressions were observed. Subsequently, we conducted Experiment 2 with 23 participants because Experiment 1 did not account for the sensitivity to color changes on the face; humans perceive greater color differences in faces than in non-faces. Participants selected which facial color they believed the expression stimulus appeared to be, choosing one of two options provided to them. The results indicated that the subjective achromatic points of anger and fear faces significantly shifted toward the opposite color direction compared with neutral faces in the brief presentation condition. This research suggests that the memory color of faces differs depending on facial expressions and supports the idea that the perception of emotional expressions can bias facial color memory.

Suicide-related cognitions and emotional bias performance in a community sample

BackgroundSuicide is theorized to be connected to social interactions and feelings of belongingness. Those with suicide-related cognitions (SRCs) demonstrate attentional bias toward negative or suicide-related words, which can lead to increased feelings of rejection or alienation. As social interactions employ both verbal and nonverbal cues, there exists a gap in understanding how perception of emotional expressions can contribute to the development or exacerbation of suicidal ideation. MethodsThe current sample (N = 114, 60.5 % female, 74.6 % white) completed the Suicide Cognitions Scale-Revised (SCS-R) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) to assess SRCs and depression severity. The Emotional Bias Task (EBT) was used to assess emotional response latency. ResultsMultiple regression analyses on EBT results showed that endorsement of SRCs and depression severity were not associated with any particular emotional response bias. However, presence of SRCs showed an association with longer latencies to identify ambiguous emotional expressions, even when controlling for depressive symptoms and age LimitationsMeasures were self-completed online. Relative homogeneity of the sample and cross-sectional design limits interpretation of the results. ConclusionsThose with more severe SRCs take longer to recognize positive, nonverbal cues. Irregular processing of positive emotional stimuli combined with bias toward negative verbal cues could worsen feelings of rejection or alienation in social interactions, therefore increasing risk of developing SI. This suggests that interventions focusing on allocation of attentional resources to process positive social cues may be beneficial for those with SRCs to reduce severity and risk of suicide.

Do masks cover more than just a face? A study on how facemasks affect the perception of emotional expressions according to their degree of intensity.

Emotional facial expressions convey crucial information in nonverbal communication and serve as a mediator in face-to-face relationships. Their recognition would rely on specific facial traits depending on the perceived emotion. During the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a facemask has thus disrupted the human ability to read emotions from faces. Yet, these effects are usually assessed across studies from faces expressing stereotypical and exaggerated emotions, which is far removed from real-life conditions. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the impact of facemasks through an emotion categorization task using morphs ranging from a neutral face and an expressive face (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) (from 0% neutral to 100% expressive in 20% steps). Our results revealed a strong impact of facemasks on the recognition of expressions of disgust, happiness, and sadness, resulting in a decrease in performance and an increase in misinterpretations, both for low and high levels of intensity. In contrast, the recognition of anger and fear, as well as neutral expression, was found to be less impacted by mask-wearing. Future studies should address this issue from a more ecological point of view with the aim of taking concrete adaptive measures in the context of daily interactions.

The effects of spatial frequency on the decoding of emotional facial expressions.

The accurate identification of emotion is critical to effectively navigating our social lives. However, it is not clear how distinct types of visual information afford the accurate perception of others' emotion states. Here, we sought to examine the influence of different spatial frequency visual information on emotion categorization, and whether distinctive emotional dimensions (valence and arousal) are differentially influenced by specific spatial frequency content. Across one pilot and two experiments (N = 603), we tested whether emotional facial expressions that vary in valence, arousal, and functional significance differ in accuracy of categorization as a function of low, intact, and high spatial frequency band information. Overall, we found a general decrease in the breadth of emotional expressions for filtered images but did not see a decrease in accuracy of categorization for the positive emotion, joy. Together, these results suggest that spatial frequency information influences perception of emotional expressions that differ in valence and arousal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Can medical aesthetic treatments improve mental health?

Can medical aesthetic treatments improve mental health?

Individual differences in social intelligence and perception of emotion expression of masked and unmasked faces

Facial expressions provide key information for successful social interactions. Recent research finds that accurate perception of emotion expressions decreases when faces are presented with face masks. What is unknown is how individual differences in social intelligence may influence perception of masked emotion expressions. In this study, participants (n = 224) completed an emotion perception task of face stimuli presented with and without face masks and completed two measures of social intelligence: the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) and the Tromsø Social Intelligence Scale (TSIS). Face masks were found to significantly decrease the accurate identification of emotion expressions, impacting the perception of disgust and sad expressions the most. Further, the type of emotion misattributed to facial expressions varied across expressions. Performance on the RMET test did predict perception accuracy, while scores on the TSIS did not. As face masks continue to be common globally, we must be aware that they cause interference with our social interactions and perceptions. Further, some individuals may be more negatively impacted by these effects than others. As such, it is important that we find ways to ensure that we are effectively communicating with one another and have patience when perception mistakes arise.

Cross-species discrimination of vocal expression of emotional valence by Equidae and Suidae

BackgroundDiscrimination and perception of emotion expression regulate interactions between conspecifics and can lead to emotional contagion (state matching between producer and receiver) or to more complex forms of empathy (e.g., sympathetic concern). Empathy processes are enhanced by familiarity and physical similarity between partners. Since heterospecifics can also be familiar with each other to some extent, discrimination/perception of emotions and, as a result, emotional contagion could also occur between species.ResultsHere, we investigated if four species belonging to two ungulate Families, Equidae (domestic and Przewalski’s horses) and Suidae (pigs and wild boars), can discriminate between vocalizations of opposite emotional valence (positive or negative), produced not only by conspecifics, but also closely related heterospecifics and humans. To this aim, we played back to individuals of these four species, which were all habituated to humans, vocalizations from a unique set of recordings for which the valence associated with vocal production was known. We found that domestic and Przewalski’s horses, as well as pigs, but not wild boars, reacted more strongly when the first vocalization played was negative compared to positive, regardless of the species broadcasted.ConclusionsDomestic horses, Przewalski’s horses and pigs thus seem to discriminate between positive and negative vocalizations produced not only by conspecifics, but also by heterospecifics, including humans. In addition, we found an absence of difference between the strength of reaction of the four species to the calls of conspecifics and closely related heterospecifics, which could be related to similarities in the general structure of their vocalization. Overall, our results suggest that phylogeny and domestication have played a role in cross-species discrimination/perception of emotions.

Effect of skin colors due to hemoglobin or melanin modulation on facial expression recognition

Facial color is thought to contribute to the perception of emotional expression. Previous studies on facial recognition have shown that reddish and bluish faces enhance the perceptions of anger and sadness, respectively. However, the effect of facial color on the recognition of facial expressions in the range of natural skin colors remains unexplored. In this study, we examined the effect of natural skin color changes on the perception of facial expressions of anger, sadness, and happiness. We used five skin color conditions for each facial expression: standard, and hemoglobin or melanin decrease/increase (H-, H+, M-, and M + ). In the experiment, we used images of different facial expressions ranging from neutral to maximum intensity. Observers judged whether a face stimulus was perceived as “angry” (“happy” or “sad”) or “not angry” (“not happy” or “not sad”). The results showed that H+, M+, H-, and M- enhanced the perception of anger and happiness, respectively. However, the change in the perception of sadness due to these modulations was small. These results suggest that the range of natural facial colors by hemoglobin and melanin modulation affects facial expression recognition. We further consider the possibility that these results could be partially explained by the lightness of the stimulus.

The role of sex and emotion on emotion perception in artificial faces: An ERP study

Sex has a significant impact on the perception of emotional expressions. However, it remains unclear whether sex influences the perception of emotions in artificial faces, which are becoming popular in emotion research. We used an emotion recognition task with FaceGen faces portraying six basic emotions aiming to investigate the effect of sex and emotion on behavioural and electrophysiological parameters. 71 participants performed the task while EEG was recorded. The recognition of sadness was the poorest, however, females recognized sadness better than males. ERP results indicated that fear, disgust, and anger evoked higher amplitudes of late positive potential over the left parietal region compared to neutral expression. Females demonstrated higher values of global field power as compared to males. The interaction between sex and emotion on ERPs was not significant. The results of our study may be valuable for future therapies and research, as it emphasizes possibly distinct processing of emotions and potential sex differences in the recognition of emotional expressions in FaceGen faces.

Simulated proximity enhances perceptual and physiological responses to emotional facial expressions

Physical proximity is important in social interactions. Here, we assessed whether simulated physical proximity modulates the perceived intensity of facial emotional expressions and their associated physiological signatures during observation or imitation of these expressions. Forty-four healthy volunteers rated intensities of dynamic angry or happy facial expressions, presented at two simulated locations, proximal (0.5 m) and distant (3 m) from the participants. We tested whether simulated physical proximity affected the spontaneous (in the observation task) and voluntary (in the imitation task) physiological responses (activity of the corrugator supercilii face muscle and pupil diameter) as well as subsequent ratings of emotional intensity. Angry expressions provoked relative activation of the corrugator supercilii muscle and pupil dilation, whereas happy expressions induced a decrease in corrugator supercilii muscle activity. In proximal condition, these responses were enhanced during both observation and imitation of the facial expressions, and were accompanied by an increase in subsequent affective ratings. In addition, individual variations in condition related EMG activation during imitation of angry expressions predicted increase in subsequent emotional ratings. In sum, our results reveal novel insights about the impact of physical proximity in the perception of emotional expressions, with early proximity-induced enhancements of physiological responses followed by an increased intensity rating of facial emotional expressions.

Emotional Gaze: The Effects of Gaze Direction on the Perception of Facial Emotions.

Previous research has found that when gaze direction matches the underlying behavioral intent communicated by the expression of a specific emotion, it enhances or facilitates the perception of that emotion; this is called the shared signal hypothesis (SSH). Specifically, a direct gaze shares an approach-orientated signal with the emotions of anger and joy, whereas an averted gaze shares an avoidance-orientated signal with fear and sadness. In this research, we attempted to verify the SSH by using different materials on Asian participants. In Experiment 1 we employed photos of models exhibiting direct and averted gazes for rating tasks, in order to study the effects of gaze direction on participants’ perception of emotion. In Experiment 2 we utilized smiling faces in a similar investigation. The results show that for neutral and smiling faces, a direct gaze (relative to a gaze of avoidance) increased the likelihood of a subject perceiving a happy mood; a gaze of avoidance increased the likelihood that anger and fear would be perceived. The effect of gaze direction on emotional expression perception was verified, but a “facilitating-impairing” pattern was not. The difference between our work and previous research may be attributable to the materials employed (which were more ecological), as well as the participants, who were from a different culture.

Прямое сравнение изображений: границы применимости «дискретной» и «многомерной» моделей восприятия эмоциональных экспрессий

Studying perception of emotional expressions suggest, supposed to analyze effectiveness of discrimination between images or the severity of specific emotional experiences. Neither paradigm allows us to fully explicate the observer’s subjective ideas about the relationships between different facial expressions, and to reconstruct the whole subjective space of perceived emotional expressions. In the experiment, a direct assessment was made of the similarity of images of strongly and weakly expressed “basic” emotional ex- pressions. In addition to actually evaluating the similarities, the study participants in free form gave the rationale for their decision. It was found that when performing direct comparison of images of emotional expressions presented for an unlimited time, observers mainly focus on assessing the emotional state in terms of “basic” emotions or equivalent to them. As a rule, strongly expressed emotional expressions are evaluated as “completely dissimilar” to each other. However, in the case of similar semantics of the expressed emotions, the expressions are evaluated as more similar, despite the fact that the observer distinguishes them well enough. Reconstruction of multidimensional space according to pairwise comparison indicates that the “basic” emotional expressions are not independent from each other constructs. The relationships between them correspond to the semantic space described by the Core Affect model. Thus, explicitly the participants in the experiment in explaining the degree of similarity describe the compared images in terms of “discrete” emotions; at the same time, the implicit structure of similarity corresponds to a two-dimensional semantic space with dimensions “pleasant — unpleasant” and “activation — deactivation”.

Perception of Emotional Expression of Mobile Humanoid Robot Using Gait-Induced Upper Body Motion

Humans can express their emotions with not only facial expressions or gestures but also whole-body motion, even while walking, which are essential for our interpersonal relationships and our interaction with others. Communication with people is also considered an important task for robots, however emotional expressions by wheeled mobile humanoid robots when moving has not been well studied. In this paper, we implemented emotional human-like gait-induced upper body motion in a mobile android ibuki . We hypothesize that the gait-induced upper body motion with vertical oscillation enhances the human perception of a mobile robot’s emotional expressions. ibuki is a mobile robot, which has a vertical oscillation mechanism, which enables the robot to move its body with a human gait-induced upper body motion. We ran two experiments in which participants watched videos of ibuki moving in a room expressing different emotions - anger, happiness, and sadness–, before answering how they perceived the emotion and their respective confidence level in their answer. Our results show that for motions with vertical oscillation, recognition rates were: 56.0 % for anger, 77.7 % for happiness, and 97.0 % for sadness. We also found that the recognition rate and confidence level of motions expressing happiness with vertical oscillation were higher. Our results play an important role in opening up avenues for more natural ways of interaction between humans and robots. For example, by approaching humans closer while expressing emotions, a robot can naturally provide an opportunity to get started conversation with them.

Expressão de Raiva e Desempenho: Testando Modelos de Moderação

Resumo Tratou-se de um estudo correlacional com 108 líderes e 176 liderados de quatro empresas públicas ou de economia mista em que se testou o efeito da percepção de raiva e de poder do líder no desempenho do liderado, moderado por dois traços pessoais dos liderados (conscienciosidade e agradabilidade). A base teórica foi o modelo EASI (Emotion as Social Information). Os liderados responderam três instrumentos: a) traços pessoais de agradabilidade e conscienciosidade; b) Medida de Poder Social Global do líder; e c) Escala de Percepção da Expressão Emocional de raiva do líder. Os líderes responderam à Medida de Desempenho de Tarefa de seus liderados. Os resultados indicaram que apenas a conscienciosidade moderou a relação entre a percepção de raiva do líder e o desempenho do liderado.

Locus of emotion influences psychophysiological reactions to music.

It is now widely accepted that the perception of emotional expression in music can be vastly different from the feelings evoked by it. However, less understood is how the locus of emotion affects the experience of music, that is how the act of perceiving the emotion in music compares with the act of assessing the emotion induced in the listener by the music. In the current study, we compared these two emotion loci based on the psychophysiological response of 40 participants listening to 32 musical excerpts taken from movie soundtracks. Facial electromyography, skin conductance, respiration and heart rate were continuously measured while participants were required to assess either the emotion expressed by, or the emotion they felt in response to the music. Using linear mixed effects models, we found a higher mean response in psychophysiological measures for the “perceived” than the “felt” task. This result suggested that the focus on one’s self distracts from the music, leading to weaker bodily reactions during the “felt” task. In contrast, paying attention to the expression of the music and consequently to changes in timbre, loudness and harmonic progression enhances bodily reactions. This study has methodological implications for emotion induction research using psychophysiology and the conceptualization of emotion loci. Firstly, different tasks can elicit different psychophysiological responses to the same stimulus and secondly, both tasks elicit bodily responses to music. The latter finding questions the possibility of a listener taking on a purely cognitive mode when evaluating emotion expression.

How positive emotional content overrules perceptual history effects: Hysteresis in emotion recognition.

The human visual system is constantly processing multiple and often conflicting sensory cues to make perceptual decisions. Given the nonlinear nature of emotion recognition, this often leads to different percepts of the same physical facial expression. Moreover, the state of the emotion recognition system might depend on the trajectory of temporal context, potentially leading to a phenomenon known as perceptual hysteresis. Here, we aimed to explore temporal context-related mechanisms underlying perceptual hysteresis during emotion recognition. We hypothesized that dependence on recent perceptual experience might reveal important clues about the role of short-term memory on the perception of emotional stimuli. Behavioral data were acquired using reality-based, changing emotion expressions morphed from a source to a target emotion with different valences, always passing through a neutral expression. Participants identified the onset and offset of what they perceived as the neutral expression interval. Our results showed that current perception of emotional expression is affected by recent temporal context, thus revealing perceptual hysteresis. We also found a relation between recent perceptual history effects and stimulus emotional Content: The positive valence of the stimulus emotional content appeared to abolish perceptual history effects, whereas negatively loaded stimuli induced clear short-term memory effects and positive hysteresis. Our findings show direct competition between recent perceptual experience and stimulus emotional content during decision making, which affects the formation of current percepts in emotion recognition.

I see it in your eyes: Training the shallowest-possible CNN to recognise emotions and pain from muted web-assisted in-the-wild video-chats in real-time

A robust value- and time-continuous emotion recognition has enormous potential benefits within healthcare. For example, within mental health, a real-time patient monitoring system capable of accurately inferring a patient’s emotional state could help doctors make an appropriate diagnosis and treatment plan. Such interventions could be vital in terms of ensuring a higher quality of life for the patient involved. To make such tools a reality, the associated machine learning systems need to be fast, robust and generalisable. In this regard, we present herein, a novel emotion recognition system consisting of the shallowest realisable Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture. We draw insights from visualisations of the trained filter weights and the facial action unit (FAU) activations, i. e. the inputs to the model, of the participants featured in the in-the-wild, spontaneous video-chat sessions of the SEWA corpus. Further, we demonstrate the generalisablity of this approach on the German, Hungarian, and Chinese cultures available in this corpus. The obtained cross-cultural performance is a testimony to the universality of FAUs in expression and understanding of the human affective behaviours. These learnings were moderately consistent with the human perception of emotional expression. The practicality of the proposed approach is also demonstrated in another key healthcare applications; pain intensity prediction. Key results from these experiments highlight the transparency of the shallow CNN structure. As FAU can be extracted in near real-time, and because the models we developed are exceptionally shallow, this study paves the way for a robust, cross-cultural, end-to-end, in-the-wild, explainable real-time affect and pain prediction, that is value- and time-continuous.

Data Analysis and Classification of Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Principal Component Analysis.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an early developmental disorder characterized by mutation of enculturation associated with attention deficit disorder in the visual perception of emotional expressions. An estimated one in more than 100 people has autism. Autism affects almost four times as many boys than girls. Data analysis and classification of ASD is still challenging due to unsolved issues arising from many severity levels and range of signs and symptoms. To understanding the functions which involved in autism, neuroscience technology analyzed responses to stimuli of autistic audio and video. The study focuses on analyzing the data set of adults and children with ASD using practical component analysis method. To satisfy this aim, the proposed method consists of three main stages including: (1) data set preparation, (2) Data analysis, and (3) Unsupervised Classification. The experimental results were performed to classify adults and children with ASD. The classification results in adults give a sensitivity of 78.6% and specificity of 82.47%, while the classification results in children give a sensitivity of 87.5% and specificity of 95.7%.

Opažanje emocija kao prediktor socijalnog funkcionisanja i kvaliteta života kod pacijenata obolelih od shizofrenije

Introduction: Perception of emotions is an important aspect of social functioning and the quality of life, and its deficit has been consistently found in people with schizophrenia. Aim: To obtain better understanding of the relationship and predictability between the perception of emotions, social functioning and the quality of life in people with schizophrenia. Method: The sample comprised 64 respondents (the clinical and the control group consisting of 32 subjects each, equal in terms of gender, age and education). Perception of emotions was measured using the test of speed and accuracy of perception of facial expression, while social functioning and the quality of life were measured via self-assessment questionnaires. The research was exploratory and non-experimental correlational. Results: In both the clinical and control groups, the perception of emotions is positively correlated with social functioning and the quality of life. Still, the direction of predictivity remains unclear due to the complexity of relationships. Compared to the control group, there was a deficit in the domains of perception of emotional expression, social functioning and the quality of life in the clinical group. The deficit in the perception of emotions in patients with schizophrenia is global and affects all emotions, while it is most pronounced when it comes to the emotions of surprise and anger. Conclusions: The obtained findings indicate that the understanding of the lack of functioning in people with schizophrenia should be sought, among other things, in the relation between the perception of emotions, social functioning and the quality of life in order to gain a better insight into choosing the proper line of treatment with the aim of improving the overall well-being of the patients.