Adaptive Face Coding Contributes to Individual Differences in Facial Expression Recognition Independently of Affective Factors

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 2018-04, Vol.44 (4), p.503-517
• Main Authors: Palermo, Romina, Jeffery, Linda, Lewandowsky, Jessica, Fiorentini, Chiara, Irons, Jessica L., Dawel, Amy, Burton, Nichola, McKone, Elinor, Rhodes, Gillian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Ability; Acknowledgment; Adolescent; Adult; Anxiety; Autism; Diet; Differences; Discrimination; Emotion Recognition; Emotions; Emotions - physiology; Face; Face Perception; Face recognition; Facial Expression; Facial Expressions; Facial Recognition - physiology; Female; Figural Aftereffect - physiology; Human; Humans; Individual Differences; Individuality; Male; Mental depression; Mood; Optimization; Pattern recognition; Perception; Recognition; Social Perception; Test Construction; Variation; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0096-1523; 1939-1277
• DOI: 10.1037/xhp0000463

There are large, reliable individual differences in the recognition of facial expressions of emotion across the general population. The sources of this variation are not yet known. We investigated the contribution of a key face perception mechanism, adaptive coding, which calibrates perception to optimize discrimination within the current perceptual "diet." We expected that a facial expression system that readily recalibrates might boost sensitivity to variation among facial expressions, thereby enhancing recognition ability. We measured adaptive coding strength with an established facial expression aftereffect task and measured facial expression recognition ability with 3 tasks optimized for the assessment of individual differences. As expected, expression recognition ability was positively associated with the strength of facial expression aftereffects. We also asked whether individual variation in affective factors might contribute to expression recognition ability, given that clinical levels of such traits have previously been linked to ability. Expression recognition ability was negatively associated with self-reported anxiety but not with depression, mood, or degree of autism-like or empathetic traits. Finally, we showed that the perceptual factor of adaptive coding contributes to variation in expression recognition ability independently of affective factors. Public Significance Statement Recognizing facial expressions of emotion is an important skill. Our study examined why people vary in their ability to recognize facial expressions. It has been suggested that adaptive coding, a perceptual factor that recalibrates the perceptual system based on recent visual experience, helps differentiate between expressions and may be associated with better facial expression recognition ability. We asked whether people who showed stronger adaptive coding of facial expressions would show better recognition. We found that they did. We also found that people who self-reported more anxiety were poorer at recognizing facial expressions. Interestingly, adaptive coding and anxiety affected individual differences in expression recognition ability independently. These results suggest that there are multiple, independent reasons why people vary in their ability to recognize facial expressions. The existence of multiple factors is a challenge for researchers designing interventions to improve facial expression recognition.