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)

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

A new theoretical approach to improving face recognition in disorders of central vision: Face caricaturing

Damage to central vision, of which age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause, leaves patients with only blurred peripheral vision. Previous approaches to improving face recognition in AMD have employed image manipulations designed to enhance early-stage visual processing (e.g., magnification, increased HSF contrast). Here, we argue that further improvement may be possible by targeting known properties of mid- and/or high-level face processing. We enhance identity-related shape information in the face by caricaturing each individual away from an average face. We simulate early- through late-stage AMD-blur by filtering spatial frequencies to mimic the amount of blurring perceived at approximately 10° through 30° into the periphery (assuming a face seen premagnified on a tablet computer).We report caricature advantages for all blur levels, for face viewpoints from front view to semiprofile, and in tasks involving perceiving differences in facial identity between pairs of people, remembering previously learned faces, and rejecting new faces as unknown. Results provide a proof of concept that caricaturing may assist in improving face recognition in AMD and other disorders of central vision

Perceived emotion genuineness: normative ratings for popular facial expression stimuli and the development of perceived-as-genuine and perceived-as-fake sets

In everyday social interactions, people’s facial expressions sometimes reflect genuine emotion (e.g., anger in response to a misbehaving child) and sometimes do not (e.g., smiling for a school photo). There is increasing theoretical interest in this distinction, but little is known about perceived emotion genuineness for existing facial expression databases. We present a new method for rating perceived genuineness using a neutral-midpoint scale (–7 = completely fake; 0 = don’t know; +7 = completely genuine) that, unlike previous methods, provides data on both relative and absolute perceptions. Normative ratings from typically developing adults for five emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and happiness) provide three key contributions. First, the widely used Pictures of Facial Affect (PoFA; i.e., “the Ekman faces”) and the Radboud Faces Database (RaFD) are typically perceived as not showing genuine emotion. Also, in the only published set for which the actual emotional states of the displayers are known (via self-report; the McLellan faces), percepts of emotion genuineness often do not match actual emotion genuineness. Second, we provide genuine/fake norms for 558 faces from several sources (PoFA, RaFD, KDEF, Gur, FacePlace, McLellan, News media), including a list of 143 stimuli that are event-elicited (rather than posed) and, congruently, perceived as reflecting genuine emotion. Third, using the norms we develop sets of perceived-as-genuine (from event-elicited sources) and perceived-as-fake (from posed sources) stimuli, matched on sex, viewpoint, eye-gaze direction, and rated intensity. We also outline the many types of research questions that these norms and stimulus sets could be used to answe