Not Everyone Reads the Room the Same

hubie writes:

Some brains perform a complicated assessment while others seem to take a shortcut:

Are you a social savant who easily reads people's emotions? Or are you someone who leaves an interaction with an unclear understanding of another person's emotional state?

New UC Berkeley research suggests those differences stem from a fundamental way our brains compute facial and contextual details, potentially explaining why some people are better at reading the room than others - sometimes, much better.

Human brains use information from faces and background context, such as the location or expressions of bystanders, when making sense of a scene and assessing someone's emotional state. If someone's facial expression is clear, but the emotional information in the context is unclear, most people's brains will heavily weigh the clear facial expression and minimize the importance of the background context. Conversely, if a facial expression is ambiguous but the background context provides strong cues of how a person feels, they'll rely more on the context to understand the person's emotions.

Think of it like a close-up photo of a person crying. Without background context, you might assume they're sad. But with context - a wedding altar, perhaps - the meaning shifts significantly.

It adds up to a complex statistical assessment that weighs different cues based on their ambiguity.

But while most people are naturally able to make those judgment calls, Berkeley psychologists say that others seemingly treat every piece of information equally. This discrepancy between complex calculus and simple averages might explain our vast differences in understanding emotions, said Jefferson Ortega, lead author of the study published today (Dec. 16) in Nature Communications.

"We don't know exactly why these differences occur," said Ortega, a psychology Ph.D. student. "But the idea is that some people might use this more simplistic integration strategy because it's less cognitively demanding, or it could also be due to underlying cognitive deficits."

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