Emotion recognition from just the eyes
When someone is wearing a face covering, we can only recognise their emotions from just the eyes. Previous research has found this to be difficult. This may be particularly more challenging for autistic individuals due to the so called “eye-avoidance” hypothesis. Here, we asked whether we can improve in our ability to recognise emotions from just the eyes as we gain more experience with face coverings?
What did we do?
We presented participants in the United Kingdom with photographs of someone expressing emotions, which were cropped to just show their eyes, and participants were asked to recognise the emotions. We did this twice: once at the start of the face covering mandate in the UK (Sepetember 2020), and again 10 months later when the face covering rules were relaxed (July 2021).
What did we find?
We found that autistic individuals and individuals with high autistic traits had better emotion recognition performance from just the eyes as a function of their experience with others wearing face coverings. That is, autistic individuals who frequently encountered others wearing face coverings showed improvement over the 10 months. Our findings thus demonstrate the malleability of emotion perception– that long-term passive exposure can modify our emotion perception ability.
Publications
Ong, J. H. and Liu, F. (2022) Frequent experience with face coverings for 10 months improves emotion perception among individuals with high autistic traits: a repeated cross-sectional study. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 174702182211355. ISSN 1747-0218 doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221135585 (In Press)
Speech & Song Emotion Perception
Autistic individuals are said to have atypical emotion perception, but most of the studies in the literature have used unimodal stimuli (e.g., static photographs), and so may not reflect real-life emotion perception in which it is typically dyanmic and multi-modal (i.e., both visual and audio cues are present). Moreover, while many have examined speech emotion perception among autistic vs. non-autistic individuals and found mixed findings, very few examined whether song emotion perception is different among autistic vs. non-autistic individuals. There are reasons to believe autistic individuals’ performance might be comparable, or even better, than non-autistic individuals in song emotion perception, given that autistic individuals are said to have enhanced music processing abilities.
What did we do?
We compared autistic vs. non-autistic individuals’ ability to recognise emotions from audio-visual (AV) clips and audio-only (AO) clips. Participants were presented with a clip, and then presented with six options to choose which best described the video they just saw. We examined their performance in terms of accuracy and reaction time (i.e., time taken to respond).
What did we find?
Data analysis is still on-going, but our preliminary results suggest that accuracy performance did not differ between autistic and non-autistic individuals for spoken and sung phrases in both AV and AO clips in terms of accuracy. Autistic individuals responded more slowly to particular emotions — such as Surprised and Sarcastic — relative to the other emotions that was not seen among non-autistic individuals.
Publications
Paper in preparation.