Observers perceive the Duchenne marker as signaling only intensity for sad expressions, not genuine emotion

The Duchenne marker-crow's feet wrinkles at the corner of the eyes-has a reputation for signaling genuine positive emotion in smiles. Here, we test whether this facial action might be better conceptualized as a marker of emotional intensity, rather than genuineness per se, and examine its perceptual outcomes beyond smiling, in sad expressions. For smiles, we found ratings of emotional intensity (how happy a face is) were unable to fully account for the effect of Duchenne status (present vs. absent) on ratings of emotion genuineness. The Duchenne marker made a unique direct contribution to the perceived genuineness of smiles, supporting its reputation for signaling genuine emotion in smiling. In contrast, across 4 experiments, we found Duchenne sad expressions were not rated as any more genuine or sincere than non-Duchenne ones. The Duchenne marker did however make sad expressions look sadder and more negative, just like it made smiles look happier and more positive. Together, these findings argue the Duchenne marker has an important role in sad as well as smiling expressions, but is interpreted differently in sad expressions (contributions to intensity only) compared with smiles (emotion genuineness independently of intensity). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Reduced willingness to approach genuine smilers in social anxiety explained by potential for social evaluation, not misperception of smile authenticity

We investigate perception of, and responses to, facial expression authenticity for the first time in social anxiety, testing genuine and polite smiles. Experiment 1 (N = 141) found perception of smile authenticity was unaffected, but that approach ratings, which are known to be reduced in social anxiety for happy faces, are more strongly reduced for genuine than polite smiles. Moreover, we found an independent contribution of social anxiety to approach ratings, over and above general negative affect (state/trait anxiety, depression), only for genuine smiles, and not for polite ones. We argue this pattern of results can be explained by genuine smilers signalling greater potential for interaction – and thus greater potential for the scrutiny that is feared in social anxiety – than polite smiles. Experiment 2 established that, relative to polite smilers, genuine smilers are indeed perceived as friendlier and likely to want to talk for longer if approached. Critically, the degree to which individual face items were perceived as wanting to interact correlated strongly with the amount that social anxiety reduced willingness to approach in Experiment 1. We conclude it is the potential for social evaluation and scrutiny signalled by happy expressions, rather than their positive valence, that is important in social anxiety.This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (DP110100850; CE110001021, see ARC Centre of Excellence for Cognition and Its Disorders at www.ccd.edu.au)

Emotional Abilities in Children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD): Impairments in Perspective-Taking and Understanding Mixed Emotions are Associated with High Callous-Unemotional Traits

Most studies of emotion abilities in disruptive children focus on emotion expression recognition. This study compared 74 children aged 4-8 years with ODD to 45 comparison children (33 healthy; 12 with an anxiety disorder) on behaviourally assessed measures of emotion perception, emotion perspective-taking, knowledge of emotions causes and understanding ambivalent emotions and on parent-reported cognitive and affective empathy. Adjusting for child's sex, age and expressive language ODD children showed a paucity in attributing causes to emotions but no other deficits relative to the comparison groups. ODD boys with high levels of callous-unemotional traits (CU) (n = 22) showed deficits relative to low CU ODD boys (n = 25) in emotion perspective-taking and in understanding ambivalent emotions. Low CU ODD boys did not differ from the healthy typically developing boys (n = 12). Impairments in emotion perceptive-taking and understanding mixed emotions in ODD boys are associated with the presence of a high level of CU

Phase-stabilized UV light at 267 nm through twofold second harmonic generation

Providing phase stable laser light is important to extend the interrogation time of optical clocks towards many seconds and thus achieve small statistical uncertainties. We report a laser system providing more than 50 µW phase-stabilized UV light at 267.4 nm for an aluminium ion optical clock. The light is generated by frequency-quadrupling a fibre laser at 1069.6 nm in two cascaded non-linear crystals, both in single-pass configuration. In the first stage, a 10 mm long PPLN waveguide crystal converts 1 W fundamental light to more than 0.2 W at 534.8 nm. In the following 50 mm long DKDP crystal, more than 50 µW of light at 267.4 nm are generated. An upper limit for the passive short-term phase stability has been measured by a beat-node measurement with an existing phase-stabilized quadrupling system employing the same source laser. The resulting fractional frequency instability of less than 5×10−17 after 1 s supports lifetime-limited probing of the 27Al+ clock transition, given a sufficiently stable laser source. A further improved stability of the fourth harmonic light is expected through interferometric path length stabilisation of the pump light by back-reflecting it through the entire setup and correcting for frequency deviations. The in-loop error signal indicates an electronically limited instability of 1 × 10−18 at 1 s

AI Hyperrealism: Why AI Faces Are Perceived as More Real Than Human Ones

Recent evidence shows that AI-generated faces are now indistinguishable from human faces. However, algorithms are trained disproportionately on White faces, and thus White AI faces may appear especially realistic. In Experiment 1 (N = 124 adults), alongside our reanalysis of previously published data, we showed that White AI faces are judged as human more often than actual human faces-a phenomenon we term AI hyperrealism. Paradoxically, people who made the most errors in this task were the most confident (a Dunning-Kruger effect). In Experiment 2 (N = 610 adults), we used face-space theory and participant qualitative reports to identify key facial attributes that distinguish AI from human faces but were misinterpreted by participants, leading to AI hyperrealism. However, the attributes permitted high accuracy using machine learning. These findings illustrate how psychological theory can inform understanding of AI outputs and provide direction for debiasing AI algorithms, thereby promoting the ethical use of AI

Does motivational intensity exist distinct from valence and arousal?

The motivational intensity model proposes that the strength of one’s urge to approach or avoid a stimulus is the primary driver of cognitive broadening/narrowing (Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2010d; Harmon-Jones et al., 2012). However, it is unclear whether motivational intensity is truly distinct from well-established dimensions of valence and arousal. Here we found an overwhelmingly strong relationship between motivational intensity and valence across all studies. In Study 1, we operationalized motivational intensity on 2 response rating scales and had multiple groups of participants (total 150) rate their response of motivational intensity, valence, and arousal to 300 pictures. There was a very strong relationship between motivational intensity and valence (rs in excess of .9, in studies 1a and 1b), which challenges the idea that these 2 constructs are distinct. In contrast, motivational intensity ratings were not consistently positively related to arousal ratings, with only a moderate relationship found with avoidance motivation. In Study 2 we used an implicit measure of motivational intensity and valence and asked participants to classify their motivational intensity and valence in response to 100 pictures from Study 1. A high degree of correspondence was found between motivational intensity and valence on this measure. Overall, our findings are at odds with proposals in the literature that arousal can be used as a proxy for motivational intensity across the full approach-avoidance spectrum. Furthermore, these studies suggest that the cognitive effects attributed to motivational intensity in previous literature are best explained by valence.This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship awarded to N.M.C. This work was supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship (FT170100021) awarded to S.C.G

All Tears Are Crocodile Tears: Impaired Perception of Emotion Authenticity in Psychopathic Traits

In everyday life, other peoples' distress is sometimes genuine (e.g., real sadness) and sometimes pretended (e.g., feigned sadness aimed at manipulating others). Here, we present the first study of how psychopathic traits affect responses to genuine versus posed distress. Using facial expression stimuli and testing individual differences across the general population (N = 140), we focus on the affective features of psychopathy (e.g., callousness, poor empathy, shallow affect). Results show that although individuals low on affective psychopathy report greater arousal and intent to help toward faces displaying genuine relative to posed distress, these differences weakened or disappeared with higher levels of affective psychopathy. Strikingly, a key theoretical prediction-that arousal should mediate the association between affective psychopathy and intent to help-was supported only for genuine distress and not for posed distress. A further novel finding was of reduced ability to discriminate the authenticity of distress expressions with higher affective psychopathy, which, in addition to and independently of arousal, also mediated the association between affective psychopathy and reduced prosociality. All effects were specific to distress emotions (did not extend to happiness, anger, or disgust), and to affective psychopathy (did not extend to Factor 2 psychopathy, disinhibition, or boldness). Overall, our findings are highly consistent with Blair's theorizing that atypical processing of distress emotions plays a key etiological role in the affective aspects of psychopathy. We go beyond these ideas to add novel evidence that unwillingness to help others is also associated with a failure to fully appreciate the authenticity of their distress.Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant to Elinor McKone (DP110100850); Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Cognition and Its Disorders (CE110001021

Coherent photo-thermal noise cancellation in a dual-wavelength optical cavity for narrow-linewidth laser frequency stabilisation

Optical resonators are used for the realisation of ultra-stable frequency lasers. The use of high reflectivity multi-band coatings allows the frequency locking of several lasers of different wavelengths to a single cavity. While the noise processes for single wavelength cavities are well known, the correlation caused by multi-stack coatings has as yet not been analysed experimentally. In our work, we stabilise the frequency of a $729\,$nm and a $1069\,$nm laser to one mirror pair and determine the residual-amplitude modulation (RAM) and photo-thermal noise (PTN). We find correlations in PTN between the two lasers and observe coherent cancellation of PTN for the $1069\,$nm coating. We show that the fractional frequency instability of the $729\,$nm laser is limited by RAM at $1\times10^{-14}$. The instability of the $1069\,$nm laser is at $3\times10^{-15}$ close to the thermal noise limit of $1.5\times10^{-15}$.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

Examining the effects of social anxiety and other individual differences on gaze-directed attentional shifts

Gaze direction is a powerful social cue, and there is considerable evidence that we preferentially direct our attentional resources to gaze-congruent locations. While a number of individual differences have been claimed to modulate gaze-cueing effects (e.g., trait anxiety), the modulation of gaze cueing for different emotional expressions of the cue has not been investigated in social anxiety, which is characterised by a range of attentional biases for stimuli perceived to be socially threatening (e.g., Mansell et al., 1999). Therefore, in this study, we examined whether social anxiety modulates gaze-cueing effects for angry, fearful, and neutral expressions, while controlling for other individual-differences variables that may modulate gaze cueing: trait anxiety, depression, and autistic-like traits. In a sample of 100 female participants, we obtained large and reliable gaze-cueing effects; however, these effects were not modulated by social anxiety, or by any of the other individual-differences variables. These findings attest to the social importance of gaze cueing, and also call into question the replicability of individual differences in the effect.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program scholarship awarded to L.A.T.; an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (No. FT170100021) awarded to S.C.G.; and an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (No. DP190103103) awarded to M.E

Why the other-race effect matters: Poor recognition of other-race faces impacts everyday social interactions

What happens to everyday social interactions when other-race recognition fails? Here, we provide the first formal investigation of this question. We gave East Asian international students (N = 89) a questionnaire concerning their experiences of the other-race effect (ORE) in Australia, and a laboratory test of their objective other-race face recognition deficit using the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT). As a 'perpetrator' of the ORE, participants reported that their problems telling apart Caucasian people contributed significantly to difficulties socializing with them. Moreover, the severity of this problem correlated with their ORE on the CFMT. As a 'victim' of the ORE, participants reported that Caucasians' problems telling them apart also contributed to difficulties socializing. Further, 81% of participants had been confused with other Asians by a Caucasian authority figure (e.g., university tutor, workplace boss), resulting in varying levels of upset/difficulty. When compared to previously established contributors to international students' high rates of social isolation, ORE-related problems were perceived as equally important as the language barrier and only moderately less important than cultural differences. We conclude that the real-world impact of the ORE extends beyond previously identified specialized settings (eyewitness testimony, security), to common everyday situations experienced by all humans.Research was supported by the Australian Research Council DP15 DP150100684 to EM andDECRA number DE180100015 to YS