Do we know how to interpret other people’s emotions correctly? Every day we see tens or even hundreds of facial expressions in other people, these expressions make us react in one way or another, depending on how we interpret them.
To what extent do we rely on our own judgment to trust others?To what extent does our confidence in recognizing the expression of an emotion depend on perceptual information or other non-perceptive information?
- There is no doubt that this trust is essential to avoid potentially dangerous situations.
- However.
- On many occasions.
- Appearances deceive.
- For better or worse.
A team at the University of Geneva in Switzerland has demonstrated the confidence we have to judge the emotions of others and which areas of the brain are activated in this process Do their results show that the beliefs of our own emotional interpretation come directly from experiences?stored in our memory, and that these experiences sometimes confuse us: the past is not a perfect predictor of the future. The results of the study were published at the end of December 2018 in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Every day we make dozens, hundreds of decisions, they all involve a certain degree of trust in someone or something, yet this trust does not always honor the decision made, sometimes we make mistakes, even when we are absolutely certain that we did the right thing. Decision. This happens in every aspect of our lives.
When it comes to social interactions, we constantly interpret expressions in the faces of those around us, in this sense being aware of subjectivity is paramount when interpreting the emotions of others, in this sense researchers were interested in proving the level of trust. we have in our interpretations of the emotional behavior of others and find out which areas of the brain are activated during these interpretations.
Scientists decided to measure confidence-related behavior, asking 34 participants to judge several faces that showed a mixture of positive and negative emotions, each side framed by two horizontal bars of different thicknesses, some of which had clear traces of joy or anger. , while others were very ambiguous.
First, participants were asked to define what emotion was represented on each of the 128 faces, they had to choose which of the two bars was the thickest, and finally, for each decision made, they had to indicate their level of confidence in their choice on a scale 1 (not very safe) to 6 (totally safe). The bars were used to assess your confidence in visual perception, which served as a control mechanism.
The test results were surprising. According to the researchers, the average level of confidence in emotional recognition was higher than in visual perception, although participants made more mistakes in emotional recognition than in the ranks.
In fact, they explain, learning emotional recognition is not as easy as perceptual judgment, the interlocutors can be ironic, lie or avoid expressing their facial emotions by social conventions, making it more difficult to properly evaluate our confidence, recognizing the emotions of others in the absence of any comment.
In addition, we must interpret an expression very quickly, because it is ephemeral, so we feel that our first impression is correct and rely on our judgment on an angry face, on the other hand, judging perception is a longer and more sensitive process. direct feedback on its accuracy. In case of doubt, trust is less than for emotions, because we are aware of our fallibility.
Researchers, using functional MRI images, examined neural mechanisms during this process of confidence in emotional recognition and explain that when participants judge lines, perception (visual areas) and areas of attention (front areas) are activated.
However, when evaluating confidence in the recognition of emotions, areas related to autobiographical and contextual memory were clarified, such as the parahippocampus and cingular gypsies.
This shows that brain systems that store personal and contextual memories are directly involved in beliefs about emotional recognition and determine the accuracy of the interpretation of facial expressions and the trust placed in this interpretation, as explained by the researchers.