Comparing static and dynamic emotion recognition tests: Performance of healthy participants

Abstract

Facial expressions have a communicatory function and the ability to read them is a prerequisite for understanding feelings and thoughts of other individuals. Impairments in recognition of facial emotional expressions are frequently found in patients with neurological conditions (e.g. stroke, traumatic brain injury, frontotemporal dementia). Hence, a standard neuropsychological assessment should include measurement of emotion recognition. However, there is debate regarding which tests are most suitable. The current study evaluates and compares three different emotion recognition tests. 84 healthy participants were included and assessed with three tests, in varying order: a. Ekman 60 Faces Test (FEEST) b. Emotion Recognition Task (ERT) c. Emotion Evaluation Test (EET). The tests differ in type of stimuli from static photographs (FEEST) to more dynamic stimuli in the form of morphed photographs (ERT) to videos (EET). Comparing performances on the three tests, the lowest total scores (67.3% correct answers) were found for the ERT. Significant, but moderate correlations were found between the total scores of the three tests, but nearly all correlations between the same emotions across different tests were not significant. Furthermore, we found cross-over effects of the FEEST and EET to the ERT; participants attained higher total scores on the ERT when another emotion recognition test had been administered beforehand. Moreover, the ERT proved to be sensitive to the effects of age and education. The present findings indicate that despite some overlap, each emotion recognition test measures a unique part of the construct. The ERT seemed to be the most difficult test: performances were lowest and influenced by differences in age and education and it was the only test that showed a learning effect after practice with other tests. This highlights the importance of appropriate norms.

Training Emotion Recognition Accuracy: Results for Multimodal Expressions and Facial Micro Expressions

“…However, ERA also varies greatly depending on methodological choices, such as test item preselection, channel of expression (face, voice, body), or type of emotion (Hall et al, 2009 ; Bänziger, 2016 ). Generally, still pictures of stereotypical emotions have higher ERA rates than dynamic stimuli (Khosdelazad et al, 2020 ), auditory ERA is more difficult than visual or audio-visual ERA (Cortes et al, 2021 ) and there seems to be a ceiling effect for the detection of happiness, which is likely due to the fact that happiness often has been the only available positive emotion in ERA tests (see e.g., Kessels et al, 2014 ).…”

Some considerations for social cognition assessment in children

“…Emotion recognition can be understood as the ability to identify different emotions expressed by the face or body posture (Khosdelazad et al, 2020), and there are several instruments to assess it, for example, the facial Expressions of Emotion–Stimuli and Tests (Young, Perrett, Calder, Sprengelmeyer, & Ekman, 2002), the Emotion Recognition Task (Montagne, Kessels, De Haan, & Perrett, 2007) and the Emotion Evaluation Test included in the Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) (McDonald, Flanagan, Rollins, & Kinch, 2003). ToM, on the other side, is defined as the ability of an individual to attribute intentions, desires and beliefs to both others and oneself (Pineda‐Alhucema, Aristizábal, & Escudero‐Cabarcas, 2017; Wellman, 2014), and the instruments to assess it are also diverse, some of them are the reading the mind in the Eyes Test (Baron‐Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001), the Faux Pas Test (Baron‐Cohen, O'Riordan, Stone, Jones, & Plaisted, 1999), the Scaling of Theory of Mind Tasks (Wellman & Liu, 2004), and recent inventories like the ToM inventory (Hutchins, Prelock, & Bonazinga, 2012; Pineda‐Alhucema, Rubio, Aristizábal, & Ossa, 2019) and finally, empathy, one of the most social cognition process studied; is defined as ‘the natural capacity to share and understand others' feelings and thoughts – is a fundamental component of emotional experience and plays a vital role in social interaction’ (p. 191) (Decety & Knafo, 2015), in other words, is feeling what others feels, and it is crucial for a successful social interaction.…”

“…Emotion recognition, ToM and empathy are affected to different degrees in various neurodevelopmental disorders, among which are autism spectrum disorder, attention‐deficit hyperactivity disorder, intellectual disability and conduct disorder among others (Khosdelazad et al, 2020; Kohls et al, 2020; Kuijper, Hartman, & Hendriks, 2015; Liu, Wang, Yang, Shyi, & Yen, 2019; Zaja & Rojahn, 2008), and depending on the disorder will be the feature and performance impairment of each domain. For example, while in autism spectrum disorder, ToM is the most affected process (Jones et al, 2018), in attention‐deficit hyperactivity disorder, it is the emotion perception but not because they are not able to identify emotions but because they tend to misinterpret them (Löytömäki, Ohtonen, Laakso, & Huttunen, 2020).…”

“…Emotion recognition can be understood as the ability to identify different emotions expressed by the face or body posture (Khosdelazad et al, 2020), and there are several instruments to assess it, for example, the facial Expressions of Emotion-Stimuli and Tests (Young, Perrett, Calder, Sprengelmeyer, & Ekman, 2002), the Emotion Recognition Task (Montagne, Kessels, De Haan, & Perrett, 2007) (Wellman & Liu, 2004), and recent inventories like the ToM inventory (Hutchins, Prelock, & Bonazinga, 2012;Pineda-Alhucema, Rubio, Aristizábal, & Ossa, 2019) and finally, empathy, one of the most social cognition process studied; is defined as 'the natural capacity to share and understand others' feelings and thoughts is a fundamental component of emotional experience and plays a vital role in social interaction' (p. 191) (Decety & Knafo, 2015), in other words, is feeling what others feels, and it is crucial for a successful social interaction. To assess empathy, there are useful tools such as the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Hawk et al, 2013), the Empathy Quotient (Lasmono, Ismail, Kaligis, Minayati, & Wiguna, 2021) or the Cognitive, Affective, and Somatic Empathy Scales (CASES) (Raine & Chen, 2018).…”

Keeping track of emotions: audiovisual integration for emotion recognition and compensation for sensory degradations captured by perceptual strategies

“…Real-life emotion recognition almost always involves dynamic stimuli (i.e., during face-to-face conversations) and both younger and older adults seem to recognize dynamic emotion stimuli somewhat better than static emotion stimuli 160,161 . Therefore, aiming for good ecological validity, in our present study we presented dynamic stimulus presentation, in the form of short movie-clips, to healthy young and older adults.…”