Research led by UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Jefferson Ortega revealed that 30% of people take a more simplistic approach\u00a0than using both facial expressions and context \u2014 depending on the ambiguity \u2014 to infer other\u2019s emotions.<\/p>\n
The study, published Tuesday in the research journal Nature Communications, found that a significant minority of people average the information given by facial expressions and context without adjusting for its reliability in the emotions of others.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ortega worked with David Whitney, campus psychology and vision science professor and principal investigator of Whitney Labs. The lab focuses on uncovering how humans perceive and interact with the world\u00a0and has previously released research regarding how humans use context to determine other\u2019s emotions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to Ortega, existing research lacks a reflection on how humans experience processing emotions in everyday life.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudies that look at emotion perception and how people process emotions of others use facial expressions that are devoid of context,\u201d Ortega said. \u201cOftentimes, they are gray scaled, so they don\u2019t even have color. They get rid of hair and everything to make sure it\u2019s only facial expressions. The reality is that the way that humans perceive emotions in the real world is nothing like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
To better capture real-world emotional processing, researchers designed experiments that used \u201ccontext rich, dynamic stimuli.\u201d A total of 944 people participated in the study and were randomly assigned into three groups.\u00a0Individuals were shown still shots from video footage and asked to infer the mood of the person on the screen.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
One group was only able to see the background while the face was blurred. The second group could only see the person\u2019s facial expression while the background was blurred. The third group was able to see the image clearly.<\/p>\n
Researchers hypothesized that people would weigh the reliability of the facial and contextual cues in determining the person\u2019s emotion and estimate which cues were less ambiguous.While this was proven true, there was a significant minority that did not factor reliability into their thought process.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things we want to know now is why do some people have these simple averaging strategies,\u201d Ortega said. \u201cIt might be due to underlying psychopathology.\u201d<\/p>\n
This discovery, according to Ortega, could help explain why individuals with disorders like autism, depression and schizophrenia have \u201cemotion processing deficits.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study does not provide a direct link between mental health conditions and how emotional cues are processed, but it creates a new area for further investigation.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Research led by UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Jefferson Ortega revealed that 30% of people take a more simplistic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[56869,56868,56871,143,145,144,149,56870],"class_list":["post-104934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-david-whitney","tag-jefferson-ortega","tag-nature-communications","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-uc-berkeley","tag-whitney-labs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}