The aftereffect of the ensemble average of facial expressions on subsequent facial expression recognition

The inside out model of emotion recognition: how the shape of one's internal emotional landscape influences the recognition of others' emotions

Some people are exceptional at reading emotional expressions, while others struggle. Here we ask whether the way we experience emotion "on the inside" influences the way we expect emotions to be expressed in the "outside world" and subsequently our ability to read others' emotional expressions. Across multiple experiments, incorporating discovery and replication samples, we develop EmoMap (N = 20; N = 271) and ExpressionMap (N = 98; replication N = 193) to map adults' experiences of emotions and visual representations of others' emotions. Some individuals have modular maps, wherein emotional experiences and visual representations are consistent and distinct-anger looks and feels different from happiness, which looks and feels different from sadness. In contrast, others have experiences and representations that are variable and overlapping-anger, happiness, and sadness look and feel similar and are easily confused for one another. Here we illustrate an association between these maps: those with consistent and distinct experiences of emotion also have consistent and distinct visual representations of emotion. Finally (N = 193), we construct the Inside Out Model of Emotion Recognition, which explains 60.8% of the variance in emotion recognition and illuminates multiple pathways to emotion recognition difficulties. These findings have important implications for understanding the emotion recognition difficulties documented in numerous clinical populations.

Familiarity Facilitates Detection of Angry Expressions

Personal familiarity facilitates rapid and optimized detection of faces. In this study, we investigated whether familiarity associated with faces can also facilitate the detection of facial expressions. Models of face processing propose that face identity and face expression detection are mediated by distinct pathways. We used a visual search paradigm to assess if facial expressions of emotion (anger and happiness) were detected more rapidly when produced by familiar as compared to unfamiliar faces. We found that participants detected an angry expression 11% more accurately and 135 ms faster when produced by familiar as compared to unfamiliar faces while happy expressions were detected with equivalent accuracies and at equivalent speeds for familiar and unfamiliar faces. These results suggest that detectors in the visual system dedicated to processing features of angry expressions are optimized for familiar faces.

Face identity and facial expression representations with adaptation paradigms: New directions for potential applications

Adaptation and aftereffect are well-known procedures for exploring our neural representation of visual stimuli. It has been reported that they occur in face identity, facial expressions, and low-level visual features. This method has two primary advantages. One is to reveal the common or shared process of faces, that is, the overlapped or discrete representation of face identities or facial expressions. The other is to investigate the coding system or theory of face processing that underlies the ability to recognize faces. This study aims to organize recent research to guide the reader into the field of face adaptation and its aftereffect and to suggest possible future expansions in the use of this paradigm. To achieve this, we reviewed the behavioral short-term aftereffect studies on face identity (i.e., who it is) and facial expressions (i.e., what expressions such as happiness and anger are expressed), and summarized their findings about the neural representation of faces. First, we summarize the basic characteristics of face aftereffects compared to simple visual features to clarify that facial aftereffects occur at a different stage and are not inherited or combinations of low-level visual features. Next, we introduce the norm-based coding hypothesis, which is one of the theories used to represent face identity and facial expressions, and adaptation is a commonly used procedure to examine this. Subsequently, we reviewed studies that applied this paradigm to immature or impaired face recognition (i.e., children and individuals with autism spectrum disorder or prosopagnosia) and examined the relationships between their poor recognition performance and representations. Moreover, we reviewed studies dealing with the representation of non-presented faces and social signals conveyed via faces and discussed that the face adaptation paradigm is also appropriate for these types of examinations. Finally, we summarize the research conducted to date and propose a new direction for the face adaptation paradigm.