Ties between reading faces, bodies, eyes, and autistic traits

Pavlova, Marina; Romagnano, Valentina; Kubon, Julian; Isernia, Sara; Fallgatter, Andreas J.; Sokolov, Alexander N.

doi:10.3389/fnins.2022.997263

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 124 publications

(195 reference statements)

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“…The number of participants was determined prior to the study by demands of statistical data processing. As in previous work [48][49][50][51] , gender was self-identified by participants; there were also no female participants with extreme masculine appearance and behavior, and vice versa. All observers had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.…”

Section: Participantssupporting

confidence: 57%

Emotions behind a mask: the value of disgust

Pavlova,

Moosavi,

Carbon

et al. 2023

Schizophr

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The impact of face masks on social cognition and interaction became a popular topic due to the long-lasting COVID-19 pandemic. This theme persists in the focus of attention beyond the pandemic, since face covering not only reduces the overall amount of face information available but also introduces biases and prejudices affecting social perception at large. Many questions are still open. One of them is whether gender of beholders affects inferring of emotions covered by face masks. Reading covered faces may be particularly challenging for individuals with mental disorders, most of which are gender-specific. Previous findings are not only sparse, but inconclusive because most research had been conducted online with resulting samples heavily dominated by females. Here in a face-to-face study, females and males were presented with a randomized set of faces covered by masks. In a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm, participants had to indicate facial emotions displayed by posers. In general, the outcome dovetails with earlier findings that face masks affect emotion recognition in a dissimilar way: Inferring some emotions suffers more severely than others, with the most pronounced influence of mask wearing on disgust and close to ceiling recognition of fear and neutral expressions. Contrary to our expectations, however, males were on overall more proficient in emotion recognition. In particular, males substantially excelled in inferring disgust. The findings help to understand gender differences in recognition of disgust, the forgotten emotion of psychiatry, that is of substantial value for a wide range of mental disorders including schizophrenia. Watch Prof. Marina Pavlova discussing this her work and this article: https://vimeo.com/860126397/5966610f49?share=copy.

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Section: Participantssupporting

confidence: 57%

Emotions behind a mask: the value of disgust

Pavlova,

Moosavi,

Carbon

et al. 2023

Schizophr

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Do subtle cultural differences sculpt face pareidolia?

et al. 2023

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Face tuning to non-face images such as shadows or grilled toasts is termed face pareidolia. Face-pareidolia images represent a valuable tool for investigation of social cognition in mental disorders. Here we examined (i) whether, and, if so, how face pareidolia is affected by subtle cultural differences; and (ii) whether this impact is modulated by gender. With this purpose in mind, females and males from Northern Italy were administered a set of Face-n-Thing images, photographs of objects such as houses or waves to a varying degree resembling a face. Participants were presented with pareidolia images with canonical upright orientation and display inversion that heavily affects face pareidolia. In a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm, beholders had to indicate whether each image resembled a face. The outcome was compared with the findings obtained in the Southwest of Germany. With upright orientation, neither cultural background nor gender affected face pareidolia. As expected, display inversion generally mired face pareidolia. Yet, while display inversion led to a drastic reduction of face impression in German males as compared to females, in Italians, no gender differences were found. In a nutshell, subtle cultural differences do not sculpt face pareidolia, but instead affect face impression in a gender-specific way under unusual viewing conditions. Clarification of the origins of these effects requires tailored brain imaging work. Implications for transcultural psychiatry, in particular, for schizophrenia research, are highlighted and discussed.

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Reading language of the eyes in female depression

Moosavi,

Resch,

Lecchi

et al. 2024

Cerebral Cortex

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Aberrations in non-verbal social cognition have been reported to coincide with major depressive disorder. Yet little is known about the role of the eyes. To fill this gap, the present study explores whether and, if so, how reading language of the eyes is altered in depression. For this purpose, patients and person-by-person matched typically developing individuals were administered the Emotions in Masked Faces task and Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, modified, both of which contained a comparable amount of visual information available. For achieving group homogeneity, we set a focus on females as major depressive disorder displays a gender-specific profile. The findings show that facial masks selectively affect inferring emotions: recognition of sadness and anger are more heavily compromised in major depressive disorder as compared with typically developing controls, whereas the recognition of fear, happiness, and neutral expressions remains unhindered. Disgust, the forgotten emotion of psychiatry, is the least recognizable emotion in both groups. On the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test patients exhibit lower accuracy on positive expressions than their typically developing peers, but do not differ on negative items. In both depressive and typically developing individuals, the ability to recognize emotions behind a mask and performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test are linked to each other in processing speed, but not recognition accuracy. The outcome provides a blueprint for understanding the complexities of reading language of the eyes within and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Ties between reading faces, bodies, eyes, and autistic traits

Cited by 3 publications

References 124 publications

Emotions behind a mask: the value of disgust

Emotions behind a mask: the value of disgust

Do subtle cultural differences sculpt face pareidolia?

Reading language of the eyes in female depression

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