General and specific abilities to recognise negative emotions, especially disgust, as portrayed in the face and the body

Abstract

We examined the ability of 150–166 undergraduate students to assign four negative emotions (sadness, fear, disgust, and anger) to five sets of emotion expression stimuli: a standard of face photographs expressing basic emotions, faces that were morphs of standards for these emotions, a special set of faces that was designed to detect different components of disgust expressions, and two sets of dynamic, video clips displays of emotions as described in traditional Hindu scriptures and used in classical Hindu dance. One of these sets presented the full body traditional displays (including hands and face), while in the second set, the same clips were used but the facial expressions were blocked out. Participants also completed an obsessive compulsive inventory and the disgust scale. Major findings are that: (a) there are some substantial individual differences in ability to correctly identify emotions; (b) the ability to detect facial emotions correlates substantially (.49) with ability to detect bodily emotions; (c) there is no evidence for specific deficits in the detection of any particular emotion; and (d) there is no relation between individual differences in obsessive‐compulsive disorder (OCD) tendencies or disgust sensitivity, in a normal sample and the ability to detect disgust.

Notes

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Paul Rozin, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3720 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19104‐6241, USA.

We thank Andrew Young for providing us with exemplars of the morphed stimuli used in the studies with Huntington's disease and OCD patients. We thank the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA, Grant R21‐DA 10858‐0) for supporting some of this research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ahalya Hejmadi

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Paul Rozin, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3720 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19104‐6241, USA. We thank Andrew Young for providing us with exemplars of the morphed stimuli used in the studies with Huntington's disease and OCD patients. We thank the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA, Grant R21‐DA 10858‐0) for supporting some of this research.