The visual perception of emotion from masks.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Norman JF
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6961933 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:According to the familiar axiom, the eyes are the window to the soul. However, wearing masks to prevent the spread of viruses such as COVID-19 involves obscuring a large portion of the face. Do the eyes carry sufficient information to allow for the accurate perception of emotions in dynamic expressions obscured by masks? What about the perception of the meanings of specific smiles? We addressed these questions in two studies. In the first, participants saw dynamic expressions of happiness, disgust, anger, and surprise that were covered by N95, surgical, or cloth masks or were uncovered and rated the extent to which the expressions conveyed each of the same four emotions. Across conditions, participants perceived significantly lower levels of the expressed (target) emotion in masked faces, and this was particularly true for expressions composed of more facial action in the lower part of the face. Higher levels of other (non-target) emotions were also perceived in masked expressions. In the second study, participants rated the extent to which three categories of smiles (reward, affiliation, and dominance) conveyed positive feelings, reassurance, and superiority, respectively. Masked smiles communicated less of the target signal than unmasked smiles, but not more of other possible signals. The present work extends recent studies of the effects of masked faces on the perception of emotion in its novel use of dynamic facial expressions (as opposed to still images) and the investigation of different types of smiles.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00097-z.
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Project description:The present study investigated the effect of facial masks on people's ability to perceive emotions in crowds. We presented faces with the bottom halves occluded by masks or full faces without occlusion. In two sequentially presented crowds, we varied the number of faces, emotional valence, and intensity of facial expressions, examining the impact of masks on the perception of crowd emotion. Participants reported which of the two crowds they would avoid based on the crowds' average emotions. The participants' ability to judge the average emotion of a crowd, especially a crowd expressing happiness, was impaired when the crowd wore masks. For faces covered by masks, crowd emotion judgments were more negatively biased than those without masks. However, participants could still distinguish the emotional intensities of a crowd wearing masks above chance. Additionally, participants responded more quickly to a crowd with more people without compromising accuracy, despite the perceptual challenges imposed by facial masks. Our results suggest that under ambiguous social situations in which individuals' emotions are partially hidden by masks, a large group may provide stronger social cues than a small group, thereby promoting communication and regulating social behaviors.
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Project description:Comparative studies of human-dog cognition have grown exponentially since the 2000's, but the focus on how dogs look at us (as well as other dogs) as social partners is a more recent phenomenon despite its importance to human-dog interactions. Here, we briefly summarise the current state of research in visual perception of emotion cues in dogs and why this area is important; we then critically review its most commonly used methods, by discussing conceptual and methodological challenges and associated limitations in depth; finally, we suggest some possible solutions and recommend best practice for future research. Typically, most studies in this field have concentrated on facial emotional cues, with full body information rarely considered. There are many challenges in the way studies are conceptually designed (e.g., use of non-naturalistic stimuli) and the way researchers incorporate biases (e.g., anthropomorphism) into experimental designs, which may lead to problematic conclusions. However, technological and scientific advances offer the opportunity to gather much more valid, objective, and systematic data in this rapidly expanding field of study. Solving conceptual and methodological challenges in the field of emotion perception research in dogs will not only be beneficial in improving research in dog-human interactions, but also within the comparative psychology area, in which dogs are an important model species to study evolutionary processes.
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2018-07-19 | GSE105084 | GEO
Project description:It has long been claimed that certain configurations of facial movements are universally recognized as emotional expressions because they evolved to signal emotional information in situations that posed fitness challenges for our hunting and gathering hominin ancestors. Experiments from the last decade have called this particular evolutionary hypothesis into doubt by studying emotion perception in a wider sample of small-scale societies with discovery-based research methods. We replicate these newer findings in the Hadza of Northern Tanzania; the Hadza are semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers who live in tight-knit social units and collect wild foods for a large portion of their diet, making them a particularly relevant population for testing evolutionary hypotheses about emotion. Across two studies, we found little evidence of universal emotion perception. Rather, our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that people infer emotional meaning in facial movements using emotion knowledge embrained by cultural learning.
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Project description:The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in increased use of face masks worldwide. Here, we examined the effect of wearing a face mask on the ability to recognise facial expressions of emotion. In a within-subjects design, 100 UK-based undergraduate students were shown facial expressions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral expression; these were either posed with or without a face mask, or with a face mask artificially imposed onto them. Participants identified the emotion portrayed in the photographs from a fixed choice array of answers and rated their confidence in their selection. While overall accuracy was higher without than with masks, the effect varied across emotions, with a clear advantage without masks in disgust, happiness, and sadness; no effect for neutral, and lower accuracy without masks for anger and fear. In contrast, confidence was generally higher without masks, with the effect clear for all emotions other than anger. These results confirm that emotion recognition is affected by face mask wearing, but reveal that the effect depends on the emotion being displayed-with this emotion-dependence not reflected in subjects' confidence. The disparity between the effects of mask wearing on different emotions and the failure of this to be reflected in confidence ratings suggests that mask wearing not only effects emotion recognition, but may also create biases in the perception of facial expressions of emotion of which perceivers are unaware. In addition, the similarity of results between the Imposed Mask and Posed Mask conditions suggests that prior research using artificially imposed masks has not been deleteriously affected by the use of this manipulation.
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Project description:BACKGROUND:Whether individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) are able to accurately perceive emotions from faces of others is unclear. Furthermore, whether individuals with AN process images of their own face differently to healthy individuals has thus far not been investigated. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate facial affect processing and the processing of one's own face through measures of emotion identification, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and eyetracking. METHODS:Twenty-four females with AN and 25 matched healthy control participants were presented with an implicit emotion processing task during fMRI and eyetracking, followed by an explicit emotion identification task. RESULTS:The AN group were found to 'hyperscan' stimuli and avoided visually attending to salient features of their own face images. RESULTS of the fMRI revealed increased activity to own face stimuli in AN in the right inferior and middle temporal gyri, and right lingual gyrus. AN participants were not found to display emotion identification deficits to the standard emotional face stimuli. DISCUSSION:The findings are discussed in terms of increased anxiety to disorder-relevant stimuli in AN. Potential clinical implications are discussed in relation to the use of eyetracking techniques to improve the perception of self in AN.
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