This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:. A person's facial expression provides crucial information for us to recognize their emotions. But there's much more to this process than that. This is according to research conducted by Dr.
The team describes emotion recognition not as a separate module, but as part of a comprehensive process that helps us form a general impression of another person. This process of person impression formation also includes physical and cultural characteristics as well as background information.
The paper was published on September 24, in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. In the s, the theory was put forward that the face is the window to our emotions. Researcher Paul Ekman described basic emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, joy and sadness using typical facial expressions, which were found to be similar across all cultures. In such a situation, people expect the person to be angry, and this expectation determines the perception of their emotion, even if their facial expression would typically be attributed to a different emotion.
Berio and Newen propose that recognizing emotions is a sub-process of our ability to form an overall impression of a person. In doing so, people are guided by certain characteristics of the other person. For example, physical appearance characteristics such as skin color, age and gender, cultural characteristics such as clothing and attractiveness, as well as situational characteristics such as facial expressions, gestures and posture.
Based on such characteristics, people tend to quickly assess others and immediately associate social status and even certain personality traits with them. These associations dictate how we perceive other people's emotions.
