A new study from the lab of HWNI member David Whitney, professor of psychology, has found differences in how people integrate facial expressions with background context when assessing the emotions of others. In the study, which was led by Psychology PhD student Jefferson Ortega and published in Nature Communications, the researchers asked 944 participants to infer the mood of a person in a series of video clips. In some clips, the person’s face was blurred, and in others, the background was blurred.
The researchers found that while most people weighed information from the face or background more heavily based on whichever cue was clearer, 30% of the participants weighed face and background information equally. These differences in how people integrate facial expressions with the surrounding context may help explain why some people are better at reading emotions than others.
