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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. Leda Berio and Professor Albert Newen from the Institute of Philosophy II at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.

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, 2024 in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Understanding the situation affects how we recognize emotions

In the 1970s, 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.

"However, in recent years it's become increasingly obvious that there are many situations in life where a typical facial expression is not necessarily the key piece of information that guides our assessment of other people's feelings," points out Newen.

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