Fig 1 - uploaded by Irene Trilla
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a Example of the continuum of sad-happy face morphs used in the emotion perception task. Due to copyright restrictions, the depicted face identity does not correspond to the one used in the study. b Example of a trial of the emotion perception task. The morph level presented was selected on a trial-by-trial basis using a 1-up/1-down adaptive procedure
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Research in social cognition has shown that our own emotional experiences are an important source of information to understand what other people are feeling. The current study investigated whether individuals project their own affective states when reading other’s emotional expressions. We used brief autobiographical recall and audiovisual stimuli...
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Citations
... Conversely, adults in happy moods did not consistently exhibit a superior recognition of happy facial expressions, though the trends were in that direction (Mast, 2010). More recently, Trilla et al. (2021) investigated how adults project their own affective states onto the interpretation of others' emotional expressions. They found that participants were more likely to classify facial expressions as happy when they reported feeling happy themselves, as opposed to when they felt sad. ...
... Based on the findings of similar studies, positive moods facilitate recall of positive stimuli and making positive judgments about others (Drace et al., 2010). Recently, Trilla et al. (2021) investigated in the same way that adults project their own affective states when reading other's emotional expressions; facial expressions were more readily classified as happy when participants reported feeling happy. They also found that participants were more likely to classify facial expressions as sad when they reported feeling sad themselves, likewise (Trilla et al., 2021). ...
... Recently, Trilla et al. (2021) investigated in the same way that adults project their own affective states when reading other's emotional expressions; facial expressions were more readily classified as happy when participants reported feeling happy. They also found that participants were more likely to classify facial expressions as sad when they reported feeling sad themselves, likewise (Trilla et al., 2021). The data suggest that for children in negative affective states, a negative bias emerged-sad participants recognize sadness more accurately than happiness and emotional neutrality. ...
Introduction
Facial emotion recognition abilities of children have been the focus of attention across various fields, with implications for communication, social interaction, and human behavior. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a face mask in public became mandatory in many countries, hindering social information perception and emotion recognition. Given the importance of visual communication for children’s social-emotional development, concerns have been raised on whether face masks could impair their ability to recognize emotions and thereby possibly impact their social-emotional development.
Methods
To this extent, a quasiexperimental study was designed with a two-fold objective: firstly, to identify children’s accuracy in recognizing basic emotions (anger, happiness, fear, disgust, sadness) and emotional neutrality when presented with faces under two conditions: one with no-masks and another with faces partially covered by various types of masks (medical, nonmedical, surgical, or cloth); secondly, to explore any correlation between children’s emotion recognition accuracy and their affective state. Sixty-nine (69) elementary school students aged 6-7 years old from Greece were recruited for this purpose. Following specific requirements of the second phase of the experiment students were assigned to one of three (3) distinct affective condition groups: Group A-Happiness, Group B-Sadness, and Group C-Emotional Neutrality. Image stimuli were drawn from the FACES Dataset, and students’ affective state was registered using the self-reporting emotions-registration tool, AffectLecture app.
Results
The study’s findings indicate that children can accurately recognize emotions even with masks, although recognizing disgust is more challenging. Additionally, following both positive and negative affective state priming promoted systematic inaccuracies in emotion recognition. Most significantly, results showed a negative bias for children in negative affective state and a positive bias for those in positive affective state.
Discussion
Children’s affective state significantly influenced their emotion recognition abilities; sad affective states led to lower recognition overall and a bias toward recognizing sad expressions, while happy affective states resulted in a positive bias, improving recognition of happiness, and affecting how emotional neutrality and sadness were actually perceived. In conclusion, this study sheds light on the intriguing dynamics of how face masks affect children’s emotion recognition, but also underlines the profound influence of their affective state.
... They used brief autobiographical recalls and audio-visual stimuli to induce temporary states of happiness, neutrality, and sadness. After each emotional induction, participants made emotion judgments about ambiguous faces displaying happiness and sadness, and the results indicated the occurrence of self-centered projection (Trilla et al., 2021). In addition, research on the relationship between emotion and decision-making has also attracted researchers' interest. ...
... In intergroup relations research, ingroup favoritism is one of the most classic and robust phenomena (Chen & Li, 2009) and influences the level of social projection (Clement & Krueger, 2002). Previous research has focused on the consequences of ingroup projection, such as the impact of different social group categorizations on social projection or the emotional experiences brought about by ingroup projection (Brinkman & Jacobi, 2020; Trilla et al., 2021). According to the ingroup projection model (Mummendey & Wenzel, 1999), when group members evaluate the group identity of others, how much money they would allocate to the other person (e.g., 30 yuan for themselves and 70 yuan for strangers). ...
Anonymous encounter cooperation is very common in human behavior. While different types of SVO affect cooperation, the effects on encounter collaboration have not been systematically studied. Here, we experimentally uncover the mechanisms underlying this behavior with SVO. Current study recruited 688 college students from southwest China, through social media and campus online forums. The participants’ average age was 21.4 years (SD = 2.05). During the experiment, the researchers manipulated group identity (dialect paradigm) and induced emotions (by showing a short movie). Participants completed measurements of SVO (using a social value orientation slider scale), social projection (using the false consensus paradigm), and initial cooperation (by playing a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game). The results showed that SVO, social projection, and cooperation were positively associated. Mediation analyses indicated that social projection partly mediated the effect of SVO on cooperation. Moreover, the relationship between SVO and social projection was moderated by emotion and group identity. The findings suggest that when relying solely on intuition to make judgments, a person’s prosocial personality determines their decision to cooperate or not, based on heuristic information. Overall, this study strengthens the conceptual model of SVO and enhances our understanding of unexpected collaboration in some contexts.
... This result is consistent with past research using very similar methods. Key persons believe that relative to nominees, they are more attracted to others, they listen better to others, and they are more extroverted than others Malloy et al., 2021Trilla et al., 2021). The present results replicate this pattern and extend the focus to dyadic morality. ...
This study addressed the nature of moral perceptions in dyadic interaction. Moral behavior has typically been studied as an individual difference; however, theory supports that moral perception often occurs in a dyad or two-person group. Therefore, the current research addresses moral responses using the Social Relations Model (SRM) to analyze perceived moral behavior between members of a dyad. The SRM estimates moral behavior expressed (actor), moral behavior elicited (partner) and moral behavior in unique two-person dyadic arrangements (relationship). This study used a research design called the idiographic key person design. Participants nominated and assessed moral behavior with 3 friends and 3 coworkers. Specifically, key persons assessed their moral behavior with nominees, nominees’ moral behavior when interacting with them, and moral behavior in nominees’ interactions with one another. Nominees did not participate. Results indicated that people hold an egocentric bias and believe they are more moral than others, and that others are more moral when interacting with them. Participants also believe that moral behavior is reciprocal in dyadic interaction. By delving into these dynamics, we gain a deeper understanding of the intricate interplay between individuals' moral perceptions and their social interactions, contributing to the broader discourse on moral psychology.
... To craft a supportive message that meets the specific needs of the distressed others, the writers have to infer the target recipients' thoughts and feelings to understand the proximal causes of the distress (Burleson, 1985;Burleson et al., 1994;High et al., 2019;Mac-George et al., 2011). Such inference is essentially egocentrically biased, involving the use of one's own experience as a frame of reference, and the projection of one's own values and affects onto the experience of others (Mitchell, 2009;Samson et al., 2010;Trilla et al., 2021). Following this line of reasoning, we regard the supportive messages in the current research as proxies of the message writers' own cognitive and affective response to the fear and uncertainty that the COVID-19 pandemic had brought. ...
Based upon a mixed-methods follow-up exploratory model, we examined the link between trust and coping during the early outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic at the society level. Qualitative data were collected from the supportive messages written by 10,072 community adults across 35 societies. Trust and coping were used as the two pre-defined themes in the conceptual content analysis. Five subthemes emerged from the theme trust, depicting five distinct trusted targets: God, a larger us, country/government, science/healthcare, and the affected. Six subthemes emerged from the theme coping, depicting six distinct coping strategies: interpersonal/social coping, religious/spiritual coping, acceptance, blame, wishful thinking, and strength-based coping. A follow-up quantitative investigation also showed that four society-level factors (viz., individualism, cultural tightness, globalization, and severity of pandemic) had differential effects on people’s trusted targets and ways of coping with the pandemic. Our study made both methodological and practical contributions to cross-cultural research on COVID-19 by using a mixed-methods approach in a multinational study and demonstrating the importance of making meaningful virtual connection during a time of physical distancing.
... Importantly, projection of one's own affective state when interpreting the emotions of others is supported by research. For example, Trilla et al. (2021) observed the phenomenon of emotional egocentricity when participants' affective states were manipulated before an emotion perception task. Participants were more likely to judge faces as sad when they were experiencing sadness as opposed to happiness, indicating that projection affects the perception of facial expressions. ...
... Specifically, depressed and remitted patients tended to mistake neutral faces for emotional faces (e.g., sad or happy), although false happy responses occurred more in the group of remitted patients. Given this strong evidence for perception of neutral faces as sad in those with depressive symptoms, along with the phenomenon of emotional egocentricity shown by Trilla et al. (2021) and the prevalence rates of depression mentioned previously, projection of depressive emotions may have impacted interpretations of neutral masked faces in the present study. ...
Previous research has found emotion interpretation biases in individuals with social anxiety (SA) when emotions are ambiguous. Additionally, research has shown that face masks impair emotion recognition. The present within-subjects, quasi-experimental study examined the impact of face masks on emotion identification in individuals with SA. After pre-screening using a brief SA scale (the SIAS-6, a shortened version of the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale), 92 undergraduate students with qualifying SA scores completed an emotion identification task. The task included images of masked and unmasked individuals expressing four emotions. Results indicated impaired accuracy for all types of masked trials. When examining incorrect choice selections, it was found that neutral masked faces were misinterpreted as sad or fearful significantly more than their unmasked counterparts, suggesting a mask-specific interpretation bias. In relation to previous research on SA and hypervigilance for threat faces, when considering all masked trials, accuracy was highest for masked angry trials. While this study was limited in that it did not include a non-anxious group, the results have interesting implications. Importantly, the present findings suggest that some previously identified SA-related emotion interpretation characteristics persist when viewing masked faces (e.g., hypervigilance for threats), while others do not (e.g., default bias for interpreting neutral as hostile). Future research should focus on elucidating the causes of the present results, which are important to this population and clinicians, as socially anxious individuals attribute greater social cost to negative emotions; thus, misinterpretation of emotions as negative may be detrimental to their mental health.
... These findings are in line with prior studies showing that music evokes changes in the subjective internal state of the listener (e.g. Gabrielsson, 2001;Goldstein, 1980;Khalfa et al., 2008), affects emotion perception (Trilla et al., 2021), and promotes adaptive responding (Brown, 2017;Katagiri, 2009). There was higher resonance for calm music in both Samples 2 and 4, which may reflect participants having past experience with using calm music to regulate emotion (Sena Moore & Hanson-Abromeit, 2015). ...
Recognising and responding appropriately to emotions is critical to adaptive psychological functioning. Psychopathic traits (e.g. callous, manipulative, impulsive, antisocial) are related to differences in recognition and response when emotion is conveyed through facial expressions and language. Use of emotional music stimuli represents a promising approach to improve our understanding of the specific emotion processing difficulties underlying psychopathic traits because it decouples recognition of emotion from cues directly conveyed by other people (e.g. facial signals). In Experiment 1, participants listened to clips of emotional music and identified the emotional content (Sample 1, N = 196) or reported on their feelings elicited by the music (Sample 2, N = 197). Participants accurately recognised (t(195) = 32.78, p < .001, d = 4.69) and reported feelings consistent with (t(196) = 7.84, p < .001, d = 1.12) the emotion conveyed in the music. However, psychopathic traits were associated with reduced emotion recognition accuracy (F(1, 191) = 19.39, p < .001) and reduced likelihood of feeling the emotion (F(1, 193) = 35.45, p < .001), particularly for fearful music. In Experiment 2, we replicated findings for broad difficulties with emotion recognition (Sample 3, N = 179) and emotional resonance (Sample 4, N = 199) associated with psychopathic traits. Results offer new insight into emotion recognition and response difficulties that are associated with psychopathic traits.
... In the study from Fernández et al. (2011) women attained higher scores than men in FS, EC, and PD (all p < .001). However, there are also studies showing that men performed comparably to women in perspective taking (Gilet et al., 2013;Olderbak et al., 2015;Surtees et al., 2012;Trilla et al., 2020). ...
ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Empathy training usually aims to improve perspective-taking skills, as this component of empathy is subject to greater cognitive developmental and environmental influences through maturation or learning processes. The empathy training for student teachers on which this study is based also successfully targets this component. The question arose to what extent the changes in perspective-taking could be gender-specific, i.e., whether men or women achieved different improvement outcomes. To this end, we used two different measures of cognitive perspective-taking that looked at state-and trait-oriented changes, respectively. On both measures, we were able to achieve significant gains in perspective taking, consistent with the pilot study, which were also consistently detectable for several weeks after the end of the study. Both male and female subjects benefited equally from our training.
... New images for this task were selected out of the remaining unused images that were neither present in the task nor the practice, divided into two bins (positive and negative valence), after which 30 images were randomly selected out of each bin. Note that another related effect, the emotional egocentricity bias, could have been measured; this effect refers to how one interprets the emotion of someone else given one's own current emotional state ( Silani et al., 2013 ;Trilla et al., 2021 ;Von Mohr, Finotti, Ambroziak, and Tsakiris, 2020 ). ...
Feeling happy, or judging whether someone else is feeling happy are two distinct facets of emotions that nevertheless rely on similar physiological and neural activity. Differentiating between these two states, also called Self/Other distinction, is an essential aspect of empathy, but how exactly is it implemented? In non-emotional cognition, the transient neural response evoked at each heartbeat, or heartbeat evoked response (HER), indexes the self and signals Self/Other distinction. Here, using electroencephalography (n=32), we probe whether HERs’ role in Self/Other distinction extends also to emotion – a domain where brain-body interactions are particularly relevant. We asked participants to rate independently validated affective scenes, reporting either their own emotion (Self) or the emotion expressed by people in the scene (Other). During the visual cue indicating to adopt the Self or Other perspective, before the affective scene, HERs distinguished between the two conditions, in visual cortices as well as in the right frontal operculum. Physiological reactivity (facial electromyogram, skin conductance, heart rate) during affective scene co-varied as expected with valence and arousal ratings, but also with the Self- or Other- perspective adopted. Finally, HERs contributed to the subjective experience of valence in the Self condition, in addition to and independently from physiological reactivity. We thus show that HERs represent a trans-domain marker of Self/Other distinction, here specifically contributing to experienced valence. We propose that HERs represent a form of evidence related to the ‘I’ part of the judgement ‘To which extent do I feel happy’. The ‘I’ related evidence would be combined with the affective evidence collected during affective scene presentation, accounting at least partly for the difference between feeling an emotion and identifying it in someone else.
... However, the links between need satisfaction and emotional competencies have not been fully confirmed [111]. Research revealed that stress could negatively affect the ability to recognize emotions [112], and the effect of emotions of negative valence is similar [113,114]. ...
Background:
This study intended to explore the role of personality traits and basic psychological needs in law enforcement officers' ability to recognize emotions: anger, joy, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, and neutral. It was significant to analyze law enforcement officers' emotion recognition and the contributing factors, as this field has been under-researched despite increased excessive force use by officers in many countries.
Methods:
This study applied the Big Five-2 (BFI-2), the Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction and Frustration Scale (BPNSFS), and the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces set of stimuli (KDEF). The data was gathered using an online questionnaire provided directly to law enforcement agencies. A total of 154 law enforcement officers participated in the study, 50.65% were females, and 49.35% were males. The mean age was 41.2 (age range = 22-61). In order to analyze the data, SEM and multiple linear regression methods were used.
Results:
This study analyzed variables of motion recognition, personality traits, and needs satisfaction and confirmed that law enforcement officers' personality traits play a significant role in emotion recognition. Respondents' agreeableness significantly predicted increased overall emotion recognition; conscientiousness predicted increased anger recognition; joy recognition was significantly predicted by extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness. This study also confirmed that law enforcement officers' basic psychological needs satisfaction/frustration play a significant role in emotion recognition. Respondents' relatedness satisfaction significantly predicted increased overall emotion recognition, fear recognition, joy recognition, and sadness recognition. Relatedness frustration significantly predicted decreased anger recognition, surprise recognition, and neutral face recognition. Furthermore, this study confirmed links between law enforcement officers' personality traits, satisfaction/frustration of basic psychological needs, and emotion recognition, χ2 = 57.924; df = 41; p = 0.042; TLI = 0.929; CFI = 0.956; RMSEA = 0.042 [0.009-0.065].
Discussion:
The findings suggested that agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism play an essential role in satisfaction and frustration of relatedness needs, which, subsequently, link to emotion recognition. Due to the relatively small sample size, the issues of validity/reliability of some instruments, and other limitations, the results of this study should preferably be regarded with concern.
... The observation of egocentric biases extends previous literature on emotional egocentricity by showing that self-projection also occurs during perception-based emotion attribution. A tendency to project one's own emotions onto others is typically indicated by emotion judgments that are biased toward the participants' own affective states, particularly in incongruent conditions (Trilla et al., 2021). These authors suggest that future studies should assess to what extent individuals attribute their own affective states when making emotion judgments in more naturalistic situations where they have access to additional contextual information and more time to correct for egocentric projections. ...
This study extends the literature on people’s understanding of happiness by asking whether positive and negative events could affect the causal attributions of what makes others happy. Using a factorial survey applied to a representative and probabilistic sample of Chileans, we examined three central causal attributions deeply rooted in Latin American folk culture. The results show that the positive family causal attribution of others’ happiness is reinforced by both negative and positive events that happened to the observer. Moreover, the attributions of health and income are unchanged. Finally, we discussed how this study contributes to understanding people’s causal attributions by examining how they are modified by critical events that affect the observer.
