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Children's ability to accurately recognize the external emotional signals produced by those around them represents a milestone in their socioemotional development and is associated with a number of important psychosocial outcomes. A plethora of individual studies have examined when, and in which order, children acquire emotion knowledge over the course of their development. Yet, very few attempts have been made to summarize this body of work quantitatively. To address this, the present meta-analysis examined the age-related trajectories of emotion recognition across childhood and the extent to which typically developing children's recognition of external emotional cues (in the face, voice, and body) is influenced by a host of participant-, task-, and stimulus-related factors. We analyzed children's emotion recognition overall (independent of specific emotion categories) and for specific basic emotions. In total, k = 129 individual studies, investigating a total of N = 31,101 2-12-year-old children's emotion recognition abilities were included in our analyses. Children's recognition accuracy across all emotion categories was significantly above chance and improved with age in the same manner for all emotions. Emotion recognition accuracy was also moderated by region of study and task type. The order in which children became proficient at identifying specific emotions was consistent with previous qualitative reviews: Happiness was the easiest emotion to recognize, and disgust and fear were the most difficult to recognize across age. Task- and stimulus-related moderator variables also influenced specific emotion categories in different ways. We contextualize these results with regard to children's socioemotional development more broadly, and we discuss how our findings can be used to guide researchers and practitioners interested in children's social skills. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

While alterations in both physiological responses to others' emotions as well as interoceptive abilities have been identified in autism, their relevance in altered emotion recognition is largely unknown. We here examined the role of interoceptive ability, facial mimicry, and autistic traits in facial emotion processing in non-autistic individuals. In an online Experiment 1, participants (N = 99) performed a facial emotion recognition task, including ratings of perceived emotional intensity and confidence in emotion recognition, and reported on trait interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive sensibility and autistic traits. In a follow-up lab Experiment 2 involving 100 participants, we replicated the online experiment and additionally investigated the relationship between facial mimicry (measured through electromyography), cardiac interoceptive accuracy (evaluated using a heartbeat discrimination task), and autistic traits in relation to emotion processing. Across experiments, neither interoception measures nor facial mimicry accounted for a reduced recognition of specific expressions with higher autistic traits. Higher trait interoceptive accuracy was rather associated with more confidence in correct recognition of some expressions, as well as with higher ratings of their perceived emotional intensity. Exploratory analyses indicated that those higher intensity ratings might result from a stronger integration of instant facial muscle activations, which seem to be less integrated in intensity ratings with higher autistic traits. Future studies should test whether facial muscle activity, and physiological signals in general, are correspondingly less predictive of perceiving emotionality in others in individuals on the autism spectrum, and whether training interoceptive abilities might facilitate the interpretation of emotional expressions., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Perceiving emotions in others is at the foundation of higher-order social cognition. The importance of emotions is evidenced by the fact that they receive prioritized attention at early stages of processing the environment in humans and some other primates. Nevertheless, we do not fully understand how emotion modulates attention over longer durations in primates, particularly in great apes. Bonobos, one of our closest relatives, stand out in emotion processing and regulation among great apes. This makes them an interesting comparison species and a valuable model for studying the evolution of emotion perception in hominids. We investigated how bonobos and humans spontaneously attend to emotionally valent scenes in a preferential looking task using eye-tracking. With Bayesian mixed modelling, we found that bonobos and humans generally looked longer at emotional scenes, mainly of conspecifics. Moreover, while bonobos did not have a bias toward emotional human scenes, humans sustained their attention toward bonobos playing, grooming and having sex. Furthermore, when exploring an immediate bias for emotions, humans showed a bias toward affiliative human scenes, and bonobos showed a bias away from bonobos-in-distress scenes. These findings suggest that emotions modulate attention at early and later attentional stages in bonobos, similar to humans.

Over the last decades, theoretical perspectives in the interdisciplinary field of the affective sciences have proliferated rather than converged due to differing assumptions about what human affective phenomena are and how they work. These metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions, shaped by academic context and values, have dictated affective constructs and operationalizations. However, an assumption about the purpose of affective phenomena can guide us to a common set of metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions. In this capstone paper, we home in on a nested teleological principle for human affective phenomena in order to synthesize metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions. Under this framework, human affective phenomena can collectively be considered algorithms that either adjust based on the human comfort zone (affective concerns) or monitor those adaptive processes (affective features). This teleologically-grounded framework offers a principled agenda and launchpad for both organizing existing perspectives and generating new ones. Ultimately, we hope the Human Affectome brings us a step closer to not only an integrated understanding of human affective phenomena, but an integrated field for affective research., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Recognising conspecifics' emotional expressions is important for nonhuman primates to navigate their physical and social environment. We address two possible mechanisms underlying emotion recognition: emotional contagion, the automatic matching of the observer's emotions to the emotional state of the observed individual, and cognitive empathy, the ability to understand the meaning and cause of emotional expressions while maintaining a distinction between own and others' emotions. We review experimental research in nonhuman primates to gain insight into the evolution of emotion recognition. Importantly, we focus on how emotional contagion and cognitive empathy can be studied experimentally. Evidence for aspects of cognitive empathy in different nonhuman primate lineages suggests that a wider range of primates than commonly assumed can infer emotional meaning from emotional expressions. Possibly, analogous rather than homologous evolution underlies emotion recognition. However, conclusions regarding its exact evolutionary course require more research in different modalities and species., (Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Humans and great apes are highly social species, and encounter conspecifics throughout their daily lives. During social interactions, they exchange information about their emotional states via expressions through different modalities including the face, body and voice. In this regard, their capacity to express emotions, intentionally or unintentionally, is crucial for them to successfully navigate their social worlds and to bond with group members. Darwin (1872) stressed similarities in how humans and other animals express their emotions, particularly with the great apes. Here, we show that emotional expressions have many conserved, yet also a number of divergent features. Some theorists consider emotional expressions as direct expressions of internal states, implying that they are involuntary, cannot be controlled and are inherently honest. Others see them as more intentional and/ or as indicators of the actor's future behavior. After reviewing the human and ape literature, we establish an integrative, evolutionary perspective and provide evidence showing that these different viewpoints are not mutually exclusive. Recent insights indicate that, in both apes and humans, some emotional expressions can be controlled or regulated voluntarily, including in the presence of audiences, suggesting modulation by cognitive processes. However, even non-intentional expressions such as pupil dilation can nevertheless inform others and influence future behavior. In sum, while showing deep evolutionary homologies across closely related species, emotional expressions show relevant species variation., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The eyes are extremely important in communication and can send a multitude of different messages. Someone's pupil size carries significant social information and can reflect different cognitive and affective states that within a social interaction can prove to be particularly meaningful. In 3 studies we investigated the impact of a person's pupil size on how others evaluate that person. In Experiment 1, participants played trust games in the role of investor. The results demonstrate that participants trusted happy compared with angry partners more, as well as those with dilating compared with constricting pupils, to whom they also assigned more positive personality traits including friendliness, attractiveness, and trustworthiness. In Experiment 2, participants played the same trust game, but this time in the role of trustee, where they had to decide to reciprocate and share a financial gain with the investor or to keep it for themselves, and act selfishly. The results show that participants reciprocated more to partners with dilating compared with constricting pupils. In Experiment 3, we found preliminary evidence that these positive behavioral changes are likely to be specifically directed to the virtual partner and do not reflect a general positivity bias. To conclude, pupil size is an important social cue that others implicitly take into account when making social decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Both patients with schizophrenia and with a major depressive disorder (MDD) display deficits in identifying facial expressions of emotion during acute phases of their illness. However, specific deficit patterns have not yet been reliably demonstrated. Tasks that employ emotionally ambiguous stimuli have recently shown distinct deficit patterns in patients with schizophrenia compared to other mental disorders as well as healthy controls. We here investigate whether a task which uses an ambiguous Japanese (Noh) mask and a corresponding human stimulus generates distinctive emotion attribution patterns in thirty-two Caucasian patients with schizophrenia, matched MDD patients and healthy controls. Results show that patients with schizophrenia displayed reaction time disadvantages compared to healthy controls while identifying sadness and anger. MDD patients were more likely to label stimuli with basic compared to subtle emotional expressions. Moreover, they showed more difficulties assigning emotions to the human stimulus than to the Noh mask. IQ, age and cognitive functioning did not modulate these results. Because overall group differences were not observed, this task is not suitable for diagnosing patients. However, the subtle differences that did emerge might give therapists handles that can be used in therapy., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

For social species, recognizing and adequately yet quickly responding to the emotions of others is crucial for their survival. The current study investigates attentional biases toward emotions in two closely related species, humans and chimpanzees. Prior research has demonstrated that humans typically show an attentional bias toward emotions. We here build on that literature by studying the underlying unconscious mechanisms within and across humans and chimpanzees and aim to gain insight into the evolutionary continuity of expressions. Experiment 1 tested whether chimpanzees show an attentional bias toward the expressions of conspecifics and whether this putative bias is modulated by the stimulus presentation duration, being 33 ms or 300 ms. The stimuli were followed by a visual mask in the form of a neutral body image. This backward-masking procedure eliminated the visibility of the stimuli that were presented for 33 ms, rendering their presentation subliminal. In contrast to our prediction, no attentional bias toward emotions was observed in chimpanzees. The goal of Experiment 2 was to verify this finding and to investigate chimpanzees' reaction to human stimuli. Replicating Experiment 1, no evidence of an attentional bias toward emotions was observed in chimpanzees. In Experiment 3 we used the same chimpanzee and human expressions in 711 museum visitors and confirmed that humans do have an attentional bias toward emotions. Interestingly, this bias was independent of the stimulus presentation duration and most strikingly, independent of the species that was observed. Implications for theorizing about species differences in attentional mechanisms in processing emotions are discussed, as well as directions for future research, to investigate our preliminary findings and this potential species difference further. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

The eyes are extremely important for communication. The muscles around the eyes express emotional states and the size of the pupil signals whether a person is aroused and alert or bored and fatigued. Pupil size is an overlooked social signal, yet is readily picked up by observers. Observers mirror their own pupil sizes in response, which can influence social impressions. In a landmark study by Hess [1975. The role of pupil size in communication. Scientific American, 233(5), 110-119] it was shown that individuals with large pupils are perceived more positively than individuals with small pupils. In that behavioral study, participants were asked to draw pupils in line drawings of faces with empty irises and they drew large pupils in the happy face, and small ones in the angry face. The current study tested 579 participants (aged 4-80 years old) and extended this work by showing that this association between large (small) pupils and a positive (negative) impression develops over age and is absent in children. Several explanations for how individuals through interactions with close others learn that large pupils mean care, interest and attention and small pupils the opposite, are discussed. To conclude, this study shows that pupil size and emotion perception are intertwined but that their relationship develops over age.

Background: Previous research has shown that context (e.g. culture) can have an impact on speed and accuracy when identifying facial expressions of emotion. Patients with a major depressive disorder (MDD) are known to have deficits in the identification of facial expressions, tending to give rather stereotypical judgments. While healthy individuals perceive situations which conflict with their own cultural values more negatively, this pattern would be even stronger in MDD patients, as their altered mood results in stronger biases. In this study we investigate the effect of cultural contextual cues on emotion identification in depression., Methods: Emotional faces were presented for 100ms to 34 patients with an MDD and matched controls. Stimulus faces were either covered by a cap and scarf (in-group condition) or by an Islamic headdress (niqab; out-group condition). Speed and accuracy were evaluated., Results: Results showed that across groups, fearful faces were identified faster and with higher accuracy in the out-group than in the in-group condition. Sadness was also identified more accurately in the out-group condition. In comparison, happy faces were more accurately (and tended to be faster) identified in the in-group condition. Furthermore, MDD patients were slower, yet not more accurate in identifying expressions of emotion compared to controls., Limitations: All patients were on pharmacological treatment. Participants' political orientation was not included. The experiment differs from real life situations., Conclusion: While our results underline findings that cultural context has a general impact on emotion identification, this effect was not found to be more prominent in patients with MDD., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

For social animals, attending to and recognizing the emotional expressions of other individuals is of crucial importance for their survival and likely has a deep evolutionary origin. Gaining insight into how emotional expressions evolved as adaptations over the course of evolution can be achieved by making direct cross-species comparisons. To that extent, experimental paradigms that are suitable for investigating emotional processing across species need to be developed and evaluated. The emotional dot-probe task, which measures attention allocation toward emotional stimuli, has this potential. The task is implicit, and subjects need minimal training to perform the task successfully. Findings in nonhuman primates, although scarce, show that they, like humans, have an attentional bias toward emotional stimuli. However, the wide literature on human studies has shown that different factors can have important moderating effects on the results. Due to the large heterogeneity of this literature, these moderating effects often remain unnoticed. We here review this literature and show that subject characteristics and differences in experimental designs affect the results of the dot-probe task. We conclude with specific recommendations regarding these issues that are particularly relevant to take into consideration when applying this paradigm to study animals.

During social interactions, people tend to automatically align with, or mimic their interactor's facial expressions, vocalizations, postures and other bodily states. Automatic mimicry might be implicated in empathy and affiliation and is impaired in several pathologies. Despite a growing body of literature on its phenomenology, the function and underlying mechanisms of mimicry remain poorly understood. The current review puts forward a new Neurocognitive Model of Emotional Contagion (NMEC), demonstrating how basic automatic mimicry can give rise to emotional contagion. We combine neurological, developmental and evolutionary insights to argue that automatic mimicry is a precursor to healthy social development. We show that (i) strong synchronization exists between people, (ii) that this resonates on different levels of processing and (iii) demonstrate how mimicry translates into emotional contagion. We conclude that our synthesized model, built upon integrative knowledge from various fields, provides a promising avenue for future research investigating the role of mimicry in human mental health and social development., (Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

The eye-region conveys important emotional information that we spontaneously attend to. Socially submissive individuals avoid other's gaze which is regarded as avoidance of others' emotional face expressions. But this interpretation ignores the fact that there are other sources of emotional information besides the face. Here we investigate whether gaze-aversion is associated with increased attention to emotional signals from the hands. We used eye-tracking to compare eye-fixations of pre-selected high and low socially anxious students when labeling bodily expressions (Experiment 1) with (non)-matching facial expressions (Experiment 2) and passively viewed (Experiment 3). High compared to low socially anxious individuals attended more to hand-regions. Our findings demonstrate that socially anxious individuals do attend to emotions, albeit to different signals than the eyes and the face. Our findings call for a closer investigation of alternative viewing patterns explaining gaze-avoidance and underscore that other signals besides the eyes and face must be considered to reach conclusions about social anxiety., (Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Paying attention to others' emotions is essential to successful social interactions. Integrating social-functional approaches to emotion with theorizing on the reciprocal nature of power, we propose that attention to others' emotions depends on concerns over one's power position and the social signal conveyed by the emotion. Others' anger signals attack-information relevant to high-power individuals who are concerned about the legitimacy or suitability of their position. On the contrary, others' fear signals vulnerability-information relevant to low-power individuals who are concerned about their unfair treatment within an illegitimate hierarchy. Accordingly, when power roles were illegitimately assigned or mismatched with one's trait power, leaders were faster at detecting the appearance of anger (Studies 1 and 2), slower at judging the disappearance of anger (Study 2), and more accurate in recognizing subordinates' anger, whereas subordinates were more accurate in recognizing leaders' fear (Study 3). Implications for theorizing about emotion and social hierarchy are discussed., (© 2016 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.)

In social animals, the fast detection of group members' emotional expressions promotes swift and adequate responses, which is crucial for the maintenance of social bonds and ultimately for group survival. The dot-probe task is a well-established paradigm in psychology, measuring emotional attention through reaction times. Humans tend to be biased toward emotional images, especially when the emotion is of a threatening nature. Bonobos have rich, social emotional lives and are known for their soft and friendly character. In the present study, we investigated (i) whether bonobos, similar to humans, have an attentional bias toward emotional scenes compared with conspecifics showing a neutral expression, and (ii) which emotional behaviors attract their attention the most. As predicted, results consistently showed that bonobos' attention was biased toward the location of the emotional versus neutral scene. Interestingly, their attention was grabbed most by images showing conspecifics such as sexual behavior, yawning, or grooming, and not as much-as is often observed in humans-by signs of distress or aggression. The results suggest that protective and affiliative behaviors are pivotal in bonobo society and therefore attract immediate attention in this species.

Humans live in, rely on, and contribute to groups. Evolution may have biologically prepared them to quickly identify others as belonging to the in-group (vs. not), to decode emotional states, and to empathize with in-group members; to learn and conform to group norms and cultural practices; to extend and reciprocate trust and cooperation; and to aggressively protect the in-group against outside threat. We review evidence that these components of human group psychology rest on and are modulated by the hypothalamic neuropeptide oxytocin. It appears that oxytocin motivates and enables humans to 1) like and empathize with others in their groups, 2) comply with group norms and cultural practices, and 3) extend and reciprocate trust and cooperation, which may give rise to intergroup discrimination and sometimes defensive aggression against threatening (members of) out-groups. We explore the possibility that deficiencies in (components of) group psychology, seen in autistic spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, and borderline personality and social anxiety disorders, may be reduced by oxytocin administration. Avenues for new research are highlighted, and implications for the role of oxytocin in cooperation and competition within and between groups are discussed., (Copyright © 2016 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

During close interactions with fellow group members, humans look into one another's eyes, follow gaze, and quickly grasp emotion signals. The eye-catching morphology of human eyes, with unique eye whites, draws attention to the middle part, to the pupils, and their autonomic changes, which signal arousal, cognitive load, and interest (including social interest). Here, we examined whether and how these changes in a partner's pupils are processed and how they affect the partner's trustworthiness. Participants played incentivized trust games with virtual partners, whose pupils dilated, remained static, or constricted. Results showed that (a) participants trusted partners with dilating pupils and withheld trust from partners with constricting pupils, (b) participants' pupils mimicked changes in their partners' pupils, and (c) dilation mimicry predicted trust in in-group partners, whereas constriction mimicry did not. We suggest that pupil-contingent trust is in-group bounded and possibly evolved in and because of group life., (© The Author(s) 2015.)

Previous reports have suggested an enhancement of facial expression recognition in women as compared to men. It has also been suggested that men versus women have a greater attentional bias towards angry cues. Research has shown that facial expression recognition impairments and attentional biases towards anger are enhanced in violent criminal male offenders. Bodily expressions of anger form a more direct physical threat as compared to facial expressions. In four experiments, we tested how 29 imprisoned aggressive male offenders perceive body expressions by other males. The performance of all participants in a matching-to-sample task dropped significantly when the distracting image showed an angry posture. Violent offenders misjudged fearful body movements as expressing anger significantly more often than the control group. When violent offenders were asked to categorize facial expressions and ignore the simultaneously presented congruent or incongruent posture, they performed worse than the control group, specifically, when a smile was combined with an aggressive posture. Finally, violent offenders showed a greater congruency effect than controls when viewing postures as part of an emotionally congruent social scene and did not perform above chance when categorizing a happy posture presented in a fight scene. The results suggest that violent offenders have difficulties in processing emotional incongruence when aggressive stimuli are involved and a possible bias towards aggressive body language.

Interest in sex-related differences in psychological functioning has again come to the foreground with new findings about their possible functional basis in the brain. Sex differences may be one way how evolution has capitalized on the capacity of homologous brain regions to process social information between men and women differently. This paper focuses specifically on the effects of emotional valence, sex of the observed and sex of the observer on regional brain activations. We also discuss the effects of and interactions between environment, hormones, genes and structural differences of the brain in the context of differential brain activity patterns between men and women following exposure to seen expressions of emotion and in this context we outline a number of methodological considerations for future research. Importantly, results show that although women are better at recognizing emotions and express themselves more easily, men show greater responses to threatening cues (dominant, violent or aggressive) and this may reflect different behavioral response tendencies between men and women as well as evolutionary effects. We conclude that sex differences must not be ignored in affective research and more specifically in affective neuroscience., (Copyright © 2012. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

Previous studies have shown that recognition of facial expressions is influenced by the affective information provided by the surrounding scene. The goal of this study was to investigate whether similar effects could be obtained for bodily expressions. Images of emotional body postures were briefly presented as part of social scenes showing either neutral or emotional group actions. In Experiment 1, fearful and happy bodies were presented in fearful, happy, neutral and scrambled contexts. In Experiment 2, we compared happy with angry body expressions. In Experiment 3 and 4, we blurred the facial expressions of all people in the scene. This way, we were able to ascribe possible scene effects to the presence of body expressions visible in the scene and we were able to measure the contribution of facial expressions to the body expression recognition. In all experiments, we observed an effect of social scene context. Bodily expressions were better recognized when the actions in the scenes expressed an emotion congruent with the bodily expression of the target figure. The specific influence of facial expressions in the scene was dependent on the emotional expression but did not necessarily increase the congruency effect. Taken together, the results show that the social context influences our recognition of a person's bodily expression.