For many, face masks have become the symbol of the global fight against COVID-19. But while face masks’ medical benefits seem to be clear, little is known about their psychological consequences, particularly on emotion recognition.

Drawing on theories of the social functions of emotions and rapid trait impressions, researchers from University of Groningen in The Netherlands tested hypotheses on face masks’ effects on emotion-recognition accuracy and social judgments (perceived trustworthiness, likability, and closeness).

The Study and Results

The Dutch study consisted of 191 German adults. Participants were (without their awareness) randomly assigned toone of two conditions: In the control condition, participants saw original face stimuli; in the mask condition, target faces were covered by a prototypical face mask.

After giving active informed consent and agreeing to not download the study materials, participants provided basic demographic information. Subsequently, participants completed an emotion-recognition task and provided social judgments. They then completed measures of their mask-as-threat and mask-as-opportunity associations. The researchers also assessed participants’ preoccupation with COVID-19 and their exposure to face masks.

Their research revealed that face masks diminish people’s ability to accurately categorize an emotion expression and make target persons appear less close.

What About Kids?

The study out of The Netherlands is not the only research that has looked at this topic.

In a report entitled “Masking Emotions: Face Masks Impair How We Read Emotions” researchers demonstrated that face masks influence the human ability to infer emotions by observing facial configurations.

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Have you ever heard of face pareidolia? This everyday phenomenon where people see faces in everyday objects is a human condition that relates to how our brains are wired. Once considered a symptom of psychosis, it arises from an error in visual perception.

According to new research led by David Alais of the University of Sydney, our brains detect and respond emotionally to these illusory faces the same way they do to real human faces.

In his paper entitled “A shared mechanism for facial expression in human faces and face pareidolia” Alais and his colleagues suggest that human brains are evolutionarily hardwired to recognize faces, with highly specialized brain regions for facial detection and processing.

The Study

According to ScienceAlert, Alais and his colleagues asked 17 volunteers to look at a series of dozens of illusory and human faces, repeated several times over, then rate the strength of emotion in each one through the same computer software.

The researchers found that the study participants mostly agreed on the expressions that the pareidolia faces were showing, and that bias crept in based on the expression of the previous face – something that we do with human faces too. This also happened when real and illusory faces were mixed up.

In other words, a succession of happy faces makes us more likely to see the next one as happy as well. That this bias was observed in both real and illusory faces suggests the brain is processing them in a similar way, and using similar neural networks.

Facial Perception

Facial perception involves more than just the features common to all human faces, like the placement of the mouth, nose, and eyes. Our brains might be evolutionarily attuned to those universal patterns, but reading social information requires being able to determine if someone is happy, angry, or sad or whether they are paying attention to us.

“What we found was that actually these pareidolia images are processed by the same mechanism that would normally process emotion in a real face,” Alais said. “You are somehow unable to totally turn off that face response and emotion response and see it as an object. It remains simultaneously an object and a face.”

Long Term Implications

Alais has been interested in this and related topics for years. For instance, in a 2016 paper published in Scientific Reports, Alais and his colleagues built on prior research involving rapid sequences of faces that demonstrated that perception of face identity, as well as attractiveness, is biased toward recently seen faces.

They designed a binary task that mimicked the selection interface in online dating websites and apps (like Tinder), in which users swipe left or right in response to whether they deem the profile pictures of potential partners attractive or unattractive. Alais et al. found that many stimulus attributes—including orientation, facial expression and attractiveness, and perceived slimness of the online dating profiles—are systematically biased toward recent past experience.

This previous study as well as the most recent one conducted may help to inform research in artificial intelligence or disorders of facial processing such as prosopagnosia.

The post Responding Emotionally to Faces on Inanimate Objects first appeared on Humintell.

Recent research out of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center suggests that “man’s best friend” are born ready to read body language and are capable of communicating and interacting with humans at a very young age with no formal training required.

Domestic dogs are born to socialize with humans because we bred them that way; the human-dog relationship goes back between 14,000–30,000 years ago and dogs have evolved alongside us. In fact, research even suggests that good are dogs at reading their owners’ emotions.

In this newest study study called “Early-emerging and highly heritable sensitivity to human communication in dogs” published in Current Biology found that two-month-old puppies can recognize when people are pointing at objects and will gaze at our faces when they’re spoken to – suggesting that dogs have an innate capacity to interact with us through body language.

Although individual relationships with people might influence that behavior, at least 40% of this ability comes from genetics alone, says lead researcher Emily Bray.

“These are quite high numbers, much the same as estimates of the heritability of intelligence in our own species. All these findings suggest that dogs are biologically prepared for communication with humans.”

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The Study

Bray and colleagues have been working with Canine Companions, the largest United States service dog organization for people with physical disabilities, for over a decade, conducting research on how dogs think and solve problems.

For her latest study, Bray and colleagues studied 375 golden retriever and labrador trainee service puppies. At eight weeks old they are just old enough to be motivated by treats. Bray and colleagues put the puppies through three tests for human-dog communication:

To understand whether the pups’ early ability could be explained by their biology, all of them were of known heritage with a similar rearing history and pedigree, which helped build a statistical model assessing genetic versus environmental factors.

1) Classic Pointing Experiment

The researchers placed the young dogs between two overturned cups—one containing a treat—and pointing to the one with the treat. The animals understood the nonverbal gesture more than two-thirds of the time, approaching the performance of adult dogs. But they didn’t get any better over a dozen rounds, suggesting they were not learning the behavior.

2) Puppy Talk

In a second experiment, a researcher stood outside a large playpen and, for 30 seconds, engaged in the kind of high-pitched “puppy talk” familiar to almost anyone who has owned a dog: “Hey puppy, look at you! You’re such a good puppy.”

The animals spent an average of 6 seconds staring at the person. Such eye contact is rare among mammals and it’s an important foundation for social interaction with people.

3) Finding Food

In a final test, the researchers taught the puppies to find food in a plastic container, then sealed it with a lid. In contrast to adult dogs, which usually give up after a few seconds and look to humans for assistance, the pups rarely gazed at their scientist companions for help.

This suggested to the researchers that puppies seem to be sensitive to receiving information from humans and that they may not yet know that they can solicit help.

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