Ties between reading faces, bodies, eyes, and autistic traits

Pavlova, Marina; Romagnano, Valentina; Kubon, Julian; Isernia, Sara; Fallgatter, Andreas J.; Sokolov, Alexander N.

doi:10.3389/fnins.2022.997263

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 124 publications

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“…The number of participants was determined prior to the study by demands of statistical data processing. As in previous work [48][49][50][51] , gender was self-identified by participants; there were also no female participants with extreme masculine appearance and behavior, and vice versa. All observers had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.…”

Section: Participantssupporting

confidence: 57%

Emotions behind a mask: the value of disgust

Pavlova,

Moosavi,

Carbon

et al. 2023

Schizophr

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The impact of face masks on social cognition and interaction became a popular topic due to the long-lasting COVID-19 pandemic. This theme persists in the focus of attention beyond the pandemic, since face covering not only reduces the overall amount of face information available but also introduces biases and prejudices affecting social perception at large. Many questions are still open. One of them is whether gender of beholders affects inferring of emotions covered by face masks. Reading covered faces may be particularly challenging for individuals with mental disorders, most of which are gender-specific. Previous findings are not only sparse, but inconclusive because most research had been conducted online with resulting samples heavily dominated by females. Here in a face-to-face study, females and males were presented with a randomized set of faces covered by masks. In a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm, participants had to indicate facial emotions displayed by posers. In general, the outcome dovetails with earlier findings that face masks affect emotion recognition in a dissimilar way: Inferring some emotions suffers more severely than others, with the most pronounced influence of mask wearing on disgust and close to ceiling recognition of fear and neutral expressions. Contrary to our expectations, however, males were on overall more proficient in emotion recognition. In particular, males substantially excelled in inferring disgust. The findings help to understand gender differences in recognition of disgust, the forgotten emotion of psychiatry, that is of substantial value for a wide range of mental disorders including schizophrenia. Watch Prof. Marina Pavlova discussing this her work and this article: https://vimeo.com/860126397/5966610f49?share=copy.

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Section: Participantssupporting

confidence: 57%

Emotions behind a mask: the value of disgust

Pavlova,

Moosavi,

Carbon

et al. 2023

Schizophr

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Do subtle cultural differences sculpt face pareidolia?

et al. 2023

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Face tuning to non-face images such as shadows or grilled toasts is termed face pareidolia. Face-pareidolia images represent a valuable tool for investigation of social cognition in mental disorders. Here we examined (i) whether, and, if so, how face pareidolia is affected by subtle cultural differences; and (ii) whether this impact is modulated by gender. With this purpose in mind, females and males from Northern Italy were administered a set of Face-n-Thing images, photographs of objects such as houses or waves to a varying degree resembling a face. Participants were presented with pareidolia images with canonical upright orientation and display inversion that heavily affects face pareidolia. In a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm, beholders had to indicate whether each image resembled a face. The outcome was compared with the findings obtained in the Southwest of Germany. With upright orientation, neither cultural background nor gender affected face pareidolia. As expected, display inversion generally mired face pareidolia. Yet, while display inversion led to a drastic reduction of face impression in German males as compared to females, in Italians, no gender differences were found. In a nutshell, subtle cultural differences do not sculpt face pareidolia, but instead affect face impression in a gender-specific way under unusual viewing conditions. Clarification of the origins of these effects requires tailored brain imaging work. Implications for transcultural psychiatry, in particular, for schizophrenia research, are highlighted and discussed.

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Inferring social signals from the eyes in male schizophrenia

Resch,

Moosavi,

Sokolov

et al. 2024

Schizophr

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Nonverbal communication habitually leaks out in ways that expose underlying thoughts, true feelings, and integrity of a counterpart. Social cognition is deficient in a wide range of mental disorders, including schizophrenia (SZ). Inferring social signals through the eyes is pivotal for social interaction but remains poorly investigated. The present work aims to fill this gap by examining whether and, if so, how reading language of the eyes is altered in SZ. We focused on male SZ, primarily because the disorder manifests a gender-specific profile. Patients and matched typically developing (TD) individuals were administered the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test-Modified (RMET-M) and Emotions in Masked Faces (EMF) task that provide comparable visual information. The findings indicate that in SZ, the emotion recognition profile is similar to TD, with a more accurate recognition of some emotions such as fear, neutral expressions, and happiness than the others (sadness and disgust). In SZ, however, this profile is shifted down: all emotions are recognized less accurately than in TD. On the RMET-M, patients are also less precise, albeit they perform better on items with positive valence. In SZ only, recognition accuracy on both tasks is tightly linked to each other. The outcome reveals global challenges for males with SZ in inferring social information in the eyes and calls for remediation programs to shape social cognition. This work offers novel insights into the profiles of social cognitive deficits in mental disorders that differ in their gender prevalence.

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Ties between reading faces, bodies, eyes, and autistic traits

Cited by 5 publications

References 124 publications

Emotions behind a mask: the value of disgust

Emotions behind a mask: the value of disgust

Do subtle cultural differences sculpt face pareidolia?

Inferring social signals from the eyes in male schizophrenia

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