I’m smiling, so I know you’re happy
I’m smiling, so I know you’re happy
13 June 2010
Magazine issue 2764. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain Topic Guide
TO FULLY understand what emotion a person is experiencing, it may help to be able to imitate their facial expressions.
So says Luigi Trojano of the Second University of Naples, Italy, after working with patients with locked-in syndrome
, who are conscious but unable to move any part of their body except their eyes, which they use to communicate. He discovered that such people often fail to identify specific emotions in others.
Trojano’s team asked seven locked-in people and 20 healthy controls to view and respond to pictures of famous actors portraying six basic emotions, such as happiness or fear. When asked to identify each emotion, the locked-in patients were wrong 57 per cent of the times they viewed fear. They were also more likely than controls to misidentify anger, sadness and disgust (The Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.6300-09.2010).
Trojano says that the inability to physically imitate facial expressions may be responsible for the deficits in emotion recognition, implying that people subconsciously imitate others to interpret their emotions.
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