Use of sign language does not favor recognition of static and dynamic emotional faces in deaf people.

Abstract

Facial expressions are especially relevant for deaf people because, in addition to the emotional content, they assume linguistic functions exclusive to sign languages. Objective: We aimed to verify whether the better recognition of facial expressions in deaf people is also maintained for stimuli with greater ecological validity. Method: In the present study, we investigated the recognition of static (photographs) and dynamic (videos) facial expressions in: (a) deaf signers with profound congenital or early acquired deafness (up to 2 years of age); (b) hearing individuals who knew sign language; and (c) hearing individuals who did not know sign language. Facial expressions of joy, sadness, fear, and anger in static and dynamic conditions were presented at 4 intensities (25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%). Results: In the dynamic condition, we found that deaf individuals had lower recognition scores compared with the other 2 groups of hearing individuals (p Ͻ .05). However, in the static condition, no differences between groups were found (p Ͼ .05). Conclusion:Those results indicate that the use of facial expressions in sign language does not necessarily favor emotion recognition, probably because facial expressions have linguistic properties not related to emotional content.

The processing of facial actions in deaf children with autism who use British Sign Language (BSL)

“…The content and boundaries of the emotion terms used, however, depend on the culture and language of the community whether that uses speech or sign (Dailey et al, 2010;Russell, 1994). While it has been suggested that deaf signers may categorize facial emotions in ways that differ from the hearing community (Claudino, da Costa, Nascimento & Torro, 2020;Grossman & Kegl, 2007), other studies show that deaf signers do show similar facial expression categorization abilities for both static and dynamic images of the 'universal facial expressions' 3 to those for hearing people who use spoken language (Rodger et al, 2021).…”