Interpretation Of Other People’s Feelings

Do you know how to interpret other people’s feelings? Every day you see dozens or hundreds of facial expressions in other people. These terms allow you to react in a certain way, depending on how you interpret them.

But do you interpret other people’s facial expressions correctly? To what extent do you trust your own assessment? Similarly, to what point does your confidence in recognizing emotional expressions of perceptual information or other non-perceptual information depend?

There is no doubt that this allows us to avoid potentially dangerous situations. However, the appearance on many occasions can be deceiving.

A team from the University of Geneva studied how confident we were that we were in our ability to interpret the feelings of others. In addition, they studied which brain areas are activated in this process. Their results showed that their emotional interpretation stems directly from the experiences stored in our memory.

But these experiences confuse us from time to time. In other words, the past is not a perfect prediction for the future. The team published the results of the study in the journal Social , Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience in December 2018.

Interpretation of other people’s feelings

You make dozens or hundreds of decisions every day. They all involve some degree of trust in someone or something. However, the said trust does not always guarantee that the decision you have made is correct. Sometimes you make bad decisions, even when you were absolutely sure you had made the right ones. This happens in all aspects of life.

When it comes to social interactions, you are constantly interpreting facial expressions from the people around you. In that sense, it is important to pay attention to subjectivity when it comes to interpreting other people’s feelings.

With that in mind, the researchers were interested in studying how confident we are in our interpretations of others’ emotional behavior. In addition, they also wanted to discover which brain areas are activated during these interpretations.

The researchers decided to measure trust-related behavior. They asked 34 participants to interpret several faces that showed a mixture of positive and negative emotions. Each face was framed in two different horizontal bars. Some faces looked happy or angry, while others were more ambiguous.

Participants first had to define what emotions each of the 128 faces represented. Then the participants had to choose which of the two pillars was thickest.

Finally, for each decision they made, they had to indicate their level of confidence in their choice. The scale ranged from 1 (not very safe) to 6 (very safe). The rods were used to assess their confidence in visual perception, which in this case acts as a control mechanism.

Shocking results

The results surprised the researchers. According to the researchers, the average level of emotional recognition for confidence level was greater than the level of visual perception. Participants, however, made more emotional recognition errors.

They explained that learning emotional recognition is not as easy as learning perceptual judgment. The other person could lie, be careless or avoid expressing the feelings of their face due to social contexts.

Thus, it is harder to measure our confidence in how we interpret other people’s feelings without other comments that can give us a clue.

You also need to interpret other people’s feelings very quickly, as expressions are short-lived. Therefore, you may feel that your first impression is correct and you trust your judgment when it comes to interpreting an angry face. On the other hand, assessment of perception is a lengthy process.

Your memory affects your self-esteem

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers investigated the neuronal mechanisms of this emotional recognition process. They explained that when the participants assessed the horizontal bars, the perception (visual areas) and the attention areas (front areas) were activated.

However, when assessing their confidence in emotional recognition, it activated areas related to autobiographical and contextual memory, such as the parahippocampal gyrus and the cingulate gyrus.

This shows that the brain systems that store personal and contextual memories are directly involved in emotional recognition. Furthermore, the researchers explained that they determine how accurately we interpret facial expressions and our confidence in this interpretation.