\u0027What one person sees as anger, for example, another might see as fear or sadness\u0027
“The process was a lot like dog breeding, where a breeder can select traits to add or remove in a dog population,” he explained. “Similarly, our participants took three dimensional faces and progressively evolved them by selecting expressions that were the closest match to the one they were aiming to create.”
“People can see expressions differently, especially when dealing with expressions of sadness and fear, which are emotions that frequently overlap,” he said. “One person might see sadness, whereas another person might see fear because they have different preconceived notions about how these emotions should look. These notions may be the result of our genes, our cultural background or social norms, or some combination of both.
But she also noted that, in the real world, most people use additional methods to communicate, such as vocalization and speech inflection, which can make a positive difference. “Research shows that emotion recognition is improved when we combine information from multiple channels,” Wingenbach said. We can’t assume “a common understanding of what emotions different facial expressions reflect,” said study co-author Isabelle Mareschal, professor of visual cognition at Queen Mary University in London. “This could have important consequences for the clinical understanding of certain conditions, where people appear to have ‘atypical’ responses to a facial expression.”Article content