"The Harder One Tries …": Findings and Insights From the Application of Covert Response Pressure Assessment Technology in Three Studies of Visual Perception

Learning emotional dialects: A British population study of cross-cultural communication

The aim of the current research was to explore whether we can improve the recognition of cross-cultural freely-expressed emotional faces in British participants. We tested several methods for improving the recognition of freely-expressed emotional faces, such as different methods for presenting other-culture expressions of emotion from individuals from Chile, New Zealand and Singapore in two experimental stages. In the first experimental stage, in phase one, participants were asked to identify the emotion of cross-cultural freely-expressed faces. In the second phase, different cohorts were presented with interactive side-by-side, back-to-back and dynamic morphing of cross-cultural freely-expressed emotional faces, and control conditions. In the final phase, we repeated phase one using novel stimuli. We found that all non-control conditions led to recognition improvements. Morphing was the most effective condition for improving the recognition of cross-cultural emotional faces. In the second experimental stage, we presented morphing to different cohorts including own-to-other and other-to-own freely-expressed cross-cultural emotional faces and neutral-to-emotional and emotional-to-neutral other-culture freely-expressed emotional faces. All conditions led to recognition improvements and the presentation of freely-expressed own-to-other cultural-emotional faces provided the most effective learning. These findings suggest that training can improve the recognition of cross-cultural freely-expressed emotional expressions.

"The many faces of sorrow": An empirical exploration of the psychological plurality of sadness

Sadness has typically been associated with failure, defeat and loss, but it has also been suggested that sadness facilitates positive and restructuring emotional changes. This suggests that sadness is a multi-faceted emotion. This supports the idea that there might in fact be different facets of sadness that can be distinguished psychologically and physiologically. In the current set of studies, we explored this hypothesis. In a first stage, participants were asked to select sad emotional faces and scene stimuli either characterized or not by a key suggested sadness-related characteristic: loneliness or melancholy or misery or bereavement or despair. In a second stage, another set of participants was presented with the selected emotional faces and scene stimuli. They were assessed for differences in emotional, physiological and facial-expressive responses. The results showed that sad faces involving melancholy, misery, bereavement and despair were experienced as conferring dissociable physiological characteristics. Critical findings, in a final exploratory design, in a third stage, showed that a new set of participants could match emotional scenes to emotional faces with the same sadness-related characteristic with close to perfect precision performance. These findings suggest that melancholy, misery, bereavement and despair can be distinguishable emotional states associated with sadness.

"There Is No (Where a) Face Like Home": Recognition and Appraisal Responses to Masked Facial Dialects of Emotion in Four Different National Cultures

The theory of universal emotions suggests that certain emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and happiness can be encountered cross-culturally. These emotions are expressed using specific facial movements that enable human communication. More recently, theoretical and empirical models have been used to propose that universal emotions could be expressed via discretely different facial movements in different cultures due to the non-convergent social evolution that takes place in different geographical areas. This has prompted the consideration that own-culture emotional faces have distinct evolutionary important sociobiological value and can be processed automatically, and without conscious awareness. In this paper, we tested this hypothesis using backward masking. We showed, in two different experiments per country of origin, to participants in Britain, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore, backward masked own and other-culture emotional faces. We assessed detection and recognition performance, and self-reports for emotionality and familiarity. We presented thorough cross-cultural experimental evidence that when using Bayesian assessment of non-parametric receiver operating characteristics and hit-versus-miss detection and recognition response analyses, masked faces showing own cultural dialects of emotion were rated higher for emotionality and familiarity compared to other-culture emotional faces and that this effect involved conscious awareness.

Individual conscious and unconscious perception of emotion: Theory, methodology and applications

In this manuscript we review a seminal debate related to subliminality and concerning the relationship of consciousness, unconsciousness, and perception. We present the methodological implementations that contemporary psychology introduced to explore this relationship, such as the application of unbiased self-report metrics and Bayesian analyses for assessing detection and discrimination. We present evidence concerning an unaddressed issue, namely, that different participants and stimulus types require different thresholds for subliminal presentation. We proceed to a step-by-step experimental illustration of a method involving individual thresholds for the presentation of masked emotional faces. We show that individual thresholds provide Bayesian evidence for null responses to the presented faces. Conversely, we show in the same database that when applying established but biased non-individual criteria for subliminality physiological changes occur and relate - correctly, and most importantly incorrectly - to perception concerning the emotional type, and the valence and intensity of a presented masked emotional face.