Browsing by Author "Tsikandilakis, Myron"

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    Learning emotional dialects: A British population study of cross-cultural communication
    (2023) Tsikandilakis, Myron; Bali, Persefoni; Lanfranco, Renzo C.; Kausel, Leonie; Yu, Zhaoliang; Boncompte, Gonzalo; Karlis, Alexandros-Konstantinos; Alshammari, Alkadi; Li, Ruiyi; Milbank, Alison; Burdett, Michael; Mevel, Pierre-Alexis; Madan, Christopher; Derrfuss, Jan
    The aim of the current research was to explore whether we can improve the recognition of cross-cultural freely-expressed emotional faces in British participants. We tested several methods for improving the recognition of freely-expressed emotional faces, such as different methods for presenting other-culture expressions of emotion from individuals from Chile, New Zealand and Singapore in two experimental stages. In the first experimental stage, in phase one, participants were asked to identify the emotion of cross-cultural freely-expressed faces. In the second phase, different cohorts were presented with interactive side-by-side, back-to-back and dynamic morphing of cross-cultural freely-expressed emotional faces, and control conditions. In the final phase, we repeated phase one using novel stimuli. We found that all non-control conditions led to recognition improvements. Morphing was the most effective condition for improving the recognition of cross-cultural emotional faces. In the second experimental stage, we presented morphing to different cohorts including own-to-other and other-to-own freely-expressed cross-cultural emotional faces and neutral-to-emotional and emotional-to-neutral other-culture freely-expressed emotional faces. All conditions led to recognition improvements and the presentation of freely-expressed own-to-other cultural-emotional faces provided the most effective learning. These findings suggest that training can improve the recognition of cross-cultural freely-expressed emotional expressions.
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    "There Is No (Where a) Face Like Home": Recognition and Appraisal Responses to Masked Facial Dialects of Emotion in Four Different National Cultures
    (2021) Tsikandilakis, Myron; Yu, Zhaoliang; Kausel, Leonie; Boncompte, Gonzalo; Lanfranco, Renzo C.; Oxner, Matt; Bali, Persefoni; Urale Leong, Poutasi; Qing, Man; Paterakis, George; Caci, Salvatore; Milbank, Alison; Mevel, Pierre-Alexis; Carmel, David; Madan, Christopher; Derrfuss, Jan; Chapman, Peter
    The theory of universal emotions suggests that certain emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and happiness can be encountered cross-culturally. These emotions are expressed using specific facial movements that enable human communication. More recently, theoretical and empirical models have been used to propose that universal emotions could be expressed via discretely different facial movements in different cultures due to the non-convergent social evolution that takes place in different geographical areas. This has prompted the consideration that own-culture emotional faces have distinct evolutionary important sociobiological value and can be processed automatically, and without conscious awareness. In this paper, we tested this hypothesis using backward masking. We showed, in two different experiments per country of origin, to participants in Britain, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore, backward masked own and other-culture emotional faces. We assessed detection and recognition performance, and self-reports for emotionality and familiarity. We presented thorough cross-cultural experimental evidence that when using Bayesian assessment of non-parametric receiver operating characteristics and hit-versus-miss detection and recognition response analyses, masked faces showing own cultural dialects of emotion were rated higher for emotionality and familiarity compared to other-culture emotional faces and that this effect involved conscious awareness.