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Accuracy of Inferring Self- and Other-Preferences from Spontaneous Facial Expressions

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Abstract

Participants’ faces were covertly recorded while they rated the attractiveness of people, the decorative appeal of paintings, and the cuteness of animals. Ratings employed a continuous scale. The same participants then returned and tried to guess ratings from 3-s videotapes of themselves and other targets. Performance was above chance in all three stimulus categories, thereby replicating the results of an earlier study (North et al. in J Exp Soc Psychol 46(6):1109–1113, 2010) but this time using a more sensitive rating procedure. Across conditions, accuracy in reading one’s own face was not reliably better than other-accuracy. We discuss our findings in the context of “simulation” theories of face-based emotion recognition (Goldman in The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) and the larger body of accuracy research.

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Notes

  1. As a non-parametric follow-up, we conducted a Monte Carlo randomization, permuting target and perceiver ratings for each domain ten thousand times. This formed a reference probability distribution of accuracy scores based upon the original data set, to which we could compare the current study’s observed accuracy scores. We counted the number of times a given perceiver's other-score was greater than 95 % of the other-scores computed from the randomized data. In each case, the success rate exceeded what is expected from chance alone (all ps < .01), thereby providing corroborating evidence for our findings.

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Correspondence to Michael S. North.

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North, M.S., Todorov, A. & Osherson, D.N. Accuracy of Inferring Self- and Other-Preferences from Spontaneous Facial Expressions. J Nonverbal Behav 36, 227–233 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-012-0137-6

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