Infusing Context Into Emotion Perception Impacts Emotion Decoding Accuracy

Abstract

Abstract. The accurate decoding of facial emotion expressions lies at the center of many research traditions in psychology. Much of this research, while paying lip service to the importance of context in emotion perception, has used stimuli that were carefully created to be deprived of contextual information. The participants' task is to associate the expression shown in the face with a correct label, essentially changing a social perception task into a cognitive task. In fact, in many cases, the task can be carried out correctly without engaging emotion recognition at all. The present article argues that infusing context in emotion perception does not only add an additional source of information but changes the way that participants approach the task by rendering it a social perception task rather than a cognitive task. Importantly, distinguishing between accuracy (perceiving the intended emotions) and bias (perceiving additional emotions to those intended) leads to a more nuanced understanding of social emotion perception. Results from several studies that use the Assessment of Contextual Emotions demonstrate the significance and social functionality of simultaneously considering emotion decoding accuracy and bias for social interaction in different cultures, their key personality and societal correlates, and their function for close relationships processes.

Narcissism predicts noise perception but not signal decoding in emotion

“…Α perceiver may correctly infer the intended emotion displayed in the expression (i.e., signal), but also infer additional and secondary emotions that are not part of the expression (i.e., noise). The additional, secondary emotions represent not necessarily an error in perception 4 . However, they represent bias, defined as idiosyncratic interpretations of emotions that are not shared by other perceivers and instead stem from the unique context, namely, perceiver’s perceptual readiness arising from personality traits, values, personal experiences, or social knowledge.…”

“…However, objective tests of emotion recognition have yielded mixed findings. In this article, we sought to clarify the relation between grandiose narcissism—both agentic and communal—and emotion recognition by breaking down the latter construct into two components: (a) signal decoding, that is, accurate decoding of the intended emotion displayed in an expression, and (b) noise perception, that is, inaccurately discerning secondary emotions in the emotional display that are not part of the emotional message 4 . We report two studies that we conducted in different cultures (Germany, Poland) using different stimulus materials.…”

Emotion recognition accuracy only weakly predicts empathic accuracy in a standard paradigm and in real life interactions

“…Recently, Hess and Kafetsios (2022) have argued and provided support for the notion that emotion recognition in designs that allow for perspective taking does not only add an additional source of information, but changes the way that participants approach the task by rendering it a social perception task rather than a cognitive task. That is, they argue that “classic” ERA tasks, which can only be “solved” via pattern matching foster a more disengaged, cognitive style that is closer to abstract problem solving.…”

“…However, this entrains other problems, such as the use of synonyms or metaphors by participants. Hess and Kafetsios (2022) further add that the use of forced choice formats does not allow participants to indicate secondary or mixed emotions.…”

A multi-channel convolutional neural network based on attention mechanism fusion for facial expression recognition

“…Incorporating attention mechanisms into multi-channel convolutional neural networks can be fruitful for facial expression recognition. The literature [14] shows that the accurate decoding of facial emotional expressions has become the center of many research traditions in psychology, so there is an urgent need to find a suitable method for the correct analysis of human expressions and, thus, human psychological emotions. The literature [15] states that when we do not actively use our facial expressions to express ourselves, those around us will not be able to read our emotions, and it is essential to choose a suitable method to improve the correct rate of facial expression recognition.…”