Interpreting Other People’s Feelings: A Question Of Self-esteem

Interpreting other people’s emotions, do you know how to do it? Every day you see dozens or hundreds of facial expressions in other people. These expressions make you 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 judgment? Similarly, to what extent is your self-confidence in emotional expression recognition dependent on perceptual information or other non-perceptual information?

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

A team from the University of Geneva studied how confident we are in our ability to interpret the feelings of others. In addition, they studied which brain areas are activated in this process. The results showed that our emotional interpretation comes directly from the experiences stored in our memory. However, these experiences sometimes confuse us. In other words, the past is not a perfect precondition for the future. The team published the results of the study in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience in December 2018.

Interpreting the feelings of others

You make dozens or hundreds of decisions every day. All of them involve a certain 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 the facial expressions of those around you. In that sense, it is important to be aware of subjectivity when it comes to interpreting the feelings of others.

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

The researchers decided to measure confidence-related behavior. They asked 34 participants to interpret several faces that showed a mixture of positive and negative emotions. Each face was framed by 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 posts was the thickest. Finally, for each decision they made, they had to indicate their degree of confidence in their choice. The scale went from 1 (not very safe) to 6 (very safe). The rods were used to assess their confidence in visual perception, which in this case serves as a control mechanism.

Shocking results

The results surprised the researchers. According to the researchers, the average level of emotional recognition was greater than the level of visual perception. However, participants made several emotional recognition errors.

They explained that learning emotional recognition is not as easy as learning a perceptual judgment. The other person may lie, be sincere, or avoid expressing their feelings in the face due to social conventions. It is therefore more difficult to correctly measure our confidence in how we interpret other people’s feelings without any other aids.

You also need to interpret the feelings of others very quickly since the expressions are short. 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, judicial opinion is a longer process.

Memory affects your self-esteem

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

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

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.