ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Genetic algorithms reveal profound individual differences in emotion recognition.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- From seeing to showing: towards a neuroscience of emotion production.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Central Vision Loss Alters Internal Emotion Representations: Evidence from a Generative Genetic Algorithm Paradigm.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Internal representations of facial emotions in schizophrenia.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2026Article
- Introducing the Naturalistic Expression Labeling Task (NELT): Associations with posed expression labeling, empathy, and general cognitive ability.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Facial features associated with fear and happiness attract gaze during brief exposure without enhancing emotion recognition.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Language-specific representation of emotion-concept knowledge causally supports emotion inference.iScience · 2024Article
- Idiosyncratic fixation patterns generalize across dynamic and static facial expression recognition.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Expression perceptive fields explain individual differences in the recognition of facial emotions.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- A simple psychophysical procedure separates representational and noise components in impairments of speech prosody perception after right-hemisphere stroke.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Facial representations of complex affective states combining pain and a negative emotion.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Facial Expression Recognition for Measuring Jurors' Attention in Acoustic Jury Tests.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Neural mechanisms for emotional contagion and spontaneous mimicry of live facial expressions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Genetic algorithms reveal profound individual differences in emotion recognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Emotional communication relies on a mutual understanding, between expresser and viewer, of facial configurations that broadcast specific emotions. However, we do not know whether people share a common understanding of how emotional states map onto facial expressions. This is because expressions exist in a high-dimensional space too large to explore in conventional experimental paradigms. Here, we address this by adapting genetic algorithms and combining them with photorealistic three-dimensional avatars to efficiently explore the high-dimensional expression space. A total of 336 people used these tools to generate facial expressions that represent happiness, fear, sadness, and anger. We found substantial variability in the expressions generated via our procedure, suggesting that different people associate different facial expressions to the same emotional state. We then examined whether variability in the facial expressions created could account for differences in performance on standard emotion recognition tasks by asking people to categorize different test expressions. We found that emotion categorization performance was explained by the extent to which test expressions matched the expressions generated by each individual. Our findings reveal the breadth of variability in people's representations of facial emotions, even among typical adult populations. This has profound implications for the interpretation of responses to emotional stimuli, which may reflect individual differences in the emotional category people attribute to a particular facial expression, rather than differences in the brain mechanisms that produce emotional responses.
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