Article in “Psychology Today”: The Surprising Benefit of Helping Someone in Distress
Have you ever watched a horror-movie alone? Surely most people would rather watch such a movie with their partner or a good friend. Of course, it’s reassuring to have a companion, who can calm you down in stressful situations. But the effect might also work the other way around: Comforting another person can help reducing your own distress.
In an exciting fMRI experiment, Simón Guendelmann investigated the benefits of regulating a partner’s emotions and how regulating others’ emotions differs from regulating one’s own emotions in the brain. An article on the “Psychology Today” website features this research and gives a great overview of the study.
You can find the “Psychology Today” article here and the original research paper in “NeuroImage” here.
You can find the original article here (open access).
Is it difficult to read emotions? It can be. Is it always equally difficult? No. Why? That was our question in our study.
Background
For some people reading people’s emotional expressions is easier that for others, and that varies in different situations. But why? Is it about the observer? The person showing the expression? The emotion itself? Or, maybe it’s an interplay of all those?
We asked these questions by investigating how the following influence difficulty of emotion perception:
observer’s age and (self-reported) sex,
actor’s age and sex,
valence (positive/negative) and arousal of the displayed emotion
Why and how?
Hey, aren’t there plenty of papers about it already? Yes, there’s a ton of emotion 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 papers. They taught us a lot, but one problem is that they assume a “ground truth” – the correct answer. E.g., if you have to label the emotion of the person in the following image, what would it be?
Whatever you just thought, your answer would be correct if it matches the pre-established label for it in a study. What is it? Usually the actor’s intention. But what if the actor intended “puzzled” and all participants say it’s “surprised”? Are they all wrong? Well, it’s difficult.
We were interested in the 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯: how hard it is to read an emotion?Importantly, we differentiated 𝘀𝘂𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 (self-rated) and 𝗼𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 difficulty (how far off is your answer from others of similar culture and gender).
For that, we used a “multidimensional emotion perception framework”, in which 441 observers rated the perceived emotion along a number of dimensions (basic emotions + interest) instead of choosing from traditionally-used discrete categories of emotions (“happy”, “surprised”,etc).
Results
Our data showed that subjective and objective emotion perception is more difficult for:
older actors
female actors (more complex signals?)
female observers (less confidence and/or picking up more subtleties?)
Also, males and the youngest/the oldest participants underestimated their difficulty (subjective difficulty was smaller than the objective one).
The effects of valence/arousal were more complicated (see the figure below and check the paper), but overall stimulus-specific factors (valence and arousal) are more important for difficulty than person-specific (actor/observer age/sex) factors.
Here is the take-home message:
we measured difficulty of emotion perception (not recognition)
the new paradigm is more sensitive and captures a broader view of human emotion perception (consider the surprising higher objective difficulty for females)
Surprised? Interested? Puzzled? Get in touch, we’re happy to discuss!
The autism-research-cooperation (AFK) developed a guideline to destigmatising and inclusive use of language in autism research for our team.
The Guideline for Language Use in Autism Research were developed following the recommendations of Bottema-Beutel et al. (2021), the publication guidelines for terminology of the scientific journals Autism and Autism in Adulthood and the discussion in the Autismus-Forschungs-Kooperation (AFK). The guideline contains recommendations for the use of diagnostic terms and the designation of subgroups and comparison groups in clinical trials. Medicalised and value-laden terms should be avoided and replaced with neutral or strengths-based language.
You can find the PDF of the guideline here: You can download the PDF below.
Every day we see dozens of faces and we are experts in their processing. Faces carry a lot of information, one of which is feedback and reward for our actions. For example, when we do something and our friend smiles in response, it’s rewarding. On the other side, sometimes we see people smile, but this smile is not a response to our actions. If smiling faces are per se rewarding, we should feel rewarded in both situations. If, however, the rewarding value of faces depends on our actions, the smile is only rewarding in the first situation. Thus, in this study we compared how people process smiling faces when they serve as feedback and when they simply appear on the screen. Further, faces differ in how familiar (known, recognisable) and socially relevant (personally important) they are. We hypothesised that more familiar and relevant faces would also be more rewarding (when providing feedback). We found that 1) familiarity plays a larger role than social relevance when processing rewarding smiling faces, and that 2) smiling faces are rewards only when they are delivered in response to some actions, and not when we passively watch them on a screen.
Social rewards are often compared in experimental designs with non-social ones: a popular pair is money (non-social) vs. a smile (social). However, we often forget that money and smiles differ on many more dimensions than just sociality. For example, money is tangible, but a smile is not. Can we then draw informative conclusions about the differences in the brain processing of social and non-social rewards? We argue that to do so, we need to use a multidimensional view on rewards.
Persons with autism may be experiencing troubles interacting socially with others because of a decreased sensitivity of their brains to social stimuli (like faces, speech, gestures, etc.). Because autism is a spectrum reaching from neurotypical persons with little or no autistic traits on one end and low-functioning persons with autism on the other, we measured brain responses to social and non-social rewards in 50+ neurotypical (i.e. not diagnosed with autism) participants differing in their levels of autistic traits. Our results show that autistic traits even in neurotypical participants influence how their brains process rewards!
