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    Does suspicion of motives mediate the relationship between social exclusion and smile discrimination? : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2017) Thacker, Melanie J.
    Individuals who are socially excluded or suspicious of other’s motives show increased sensitivity to social cues signalling positive affect. Facial expressions such as smiles are cues that signal affiliative intent. They may occur in the presence or absence of positive felt emotion, creating uncertainty for perceivers about affiliative motives underlying the expression. Excluded or suspicious individuals are better able to determine authenticity of such expressions and use the information to guide their social interactions with others. Despite shared theoretical frameworks, no research has examined a potential relationship between social exclusion and suspicion of motives themselves. Sample frames used have also lacked cultural diversity, inhibiting ability to generalise findings beyond Western European or American populations. The current study seeks to address both issues. This study predicted that feelings of social exclusion would make a person more suspicious of others’ social motives and that changes in levels of suspicion would mediate the relationship between a person’s feelings of exclusion and their ability to differentiate the social content of smiles. One hundred and eleven students of East and Southeast Asian origin, aged 18 to 50 years, were recruited to participate in the study from Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. They completed an online survey where they were randomly assigned to one of two experimental social pain conditions (exclusion or inclusion). Cyberball was used to manipulate feelings of social pain, before participants were administered the Suspicion of Motive Index, a smile discrimination task, and the Needs Threat Scale. Results indicated that Cyberball reliably elicited feelings of exclusion and inclusion but found no significant evidence to support the hypothesised relationships between social exclusion, suspicion of motive and smile discrimination. The findings indicate that effects measured in previous research cannot be generalised to the present sample frame in the New Zealand context. The current study raises questions about the theoretical and methodological universality of the constructs and how they may be influenced by underlying cultural differences in intergroup relations, situational context, emotion expression, perception and recognition.
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    Understanding the link between emotional recognition and awareness, therapy, and training : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2018) Johnsen, Amanda Leah
    Therapy is an emotionally laden event, both for individuals seeking therapeutic intervention and the therapists who provide it. While the recognition of emotions in the general population has been a popular topic of research, very little research has been conducted into the emotional competencies, or more specifically, emotion recognition and awareness of therapists. In addition, there are few studies on the effectiveness of emotion recognition training for therapists’ emotional competencies, which is surprising given the innately emotional moments that clients and therapists experience during therapeutic work. This study aimed to address these gaps by investigating the association between emotional recognition, awareness, practice, and training. Fifty five therapists made up of clinical psychologists, counsellors, and a psychotherapist completed an online task that involved completion of a social-emotional orientated questionnaire and an emotion recognition task. Of these 55 participants, 26 completed an emotion recognition training before completing the same task again, two weeks later, while the remainder 29 participants were instructed to participate in no emotion recognition training. The results revealed that, compared to the no treatment condition, those who received emotion recognition training were more accurate in their recognition of emotions and also reported higher use of therapeutic emotional practice. Unexpectedly, participants who completed emotion recognition training reported less emotional awareness than the control group. Related to this, an inverse relationship was found between emotion recognition ability and self-reported emotional awareness, as well as the finding for some support for an inverse relationship between emotion recognition ability and self-reported use of emotional practice. There are two implications of this research; first, emotion recognition training increases therapists’ accuracy in emotion recognition, and second, therapists may need to be provided emotional practice feedback by an alternative form rather than through supervision or client outcome. This is due to an inverse relationship being found between participants’ actual and perceived emotional awareness. Therefore, future research into social-emotional practices and client outcomes will be advised to be considered. The limitations of the study and areas for future research are also discussed.
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    Behind the mask : recognising genuine and masked expressions of emotion : the effect of therapists' training and experience : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2017) Curtis, Alexa Anne
    Accurately recognising facial expressions of emotion can enhance communication and the development of a therapeutic relationship. When emotions are masked or inhibited, duplicity can be betrayed through evidence of leakage of the underlying emotion occurring in the face. Being able to discern when emotions are masked or concealed may also contribute to therapy outcomes by alerting the therapist to areas requiring further exploration. Despite a large body of research on facial expression of emotion, there is a dearth of research into therapists’ emotion recognition competencies or ability to detect deception. This study sought to answer the following questions: First, is recognition of facial emotional expressions, including masked expressions, enhanced by training? Second, does clinical experience impact on emotion recognition ability? Finally, does training increase the ability to discern authentic from falsified expressions? In Study 1, 43 clinical psychologists were recruited for the study and undertook an emotion recognition and deception detection task. Twenty-­‐two of the participants completed training in emotion recognition using the Subtle Expression Training Tool (SETT; http://www.paulekman.com). In Study 2, a partial replication of Study 1 was conducted with 25 participants, and an updated version of the SETT. Results for recognition of emotion were mixed, with partial support found for the hypothesis that training would enhance recognition ability. Training was effective for improving recognition of single emotion expressions, but had less impact on recognition for masked or leaked expressions, with the exception of sadness. Efficacy of training was also dependent on experience level, with more experienced participants benefiting the most. All participants were able to detect emotional deception at levels above chance prior to training. Following training, those with a high level of experience demonstrated the greatest improvement in deception detection, with half of this group accurately detecting deception at levels significantly above chance (M = .74).
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    Emotion recognition and intellectual disability : development of the kinetic emotion recognition assessment and evaluation of the emotion specificity hypothesis : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2017) Godinovich, Zara Angela
    Deficits in social adaptive functioning are a defining criterion of intellectual disability (ID) (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), and a key predictor of social inclusion and subsequent quality of life (Kozma, Mansell, & Beadle-Brown, 2009). Impairment in facial emotion recognition is often cited as the component skill responsible for the social difficulties observed. This position has been formally conceptualised by the emotion specificity hypothesis (ESH; Rojahn, Rabold, & Schneider, 1995), which proposes that individuals with ID manifest a specific deficit in facial emotion recognition beyond that which can be explained by difficulties in general intellectual functioning. Despite apparent widespread acceptance, there is not yet sufficient evidence to substantiate these claims. Moore (2001) proposes that emotion perception capacities may be intact in people with ID, and that reported deficits are instead, due to emotion recognition tasks making extensive cognitive demands that disadvantage those with lesser cognitive abilities. The aim of the present study was to clarify the nature of facial emotion recognition abilities in adults with mild ID. To this end, the Kinetic Emotion Recognition Assessment (KERA), a video-based measure of facial emotion recognition, was developed and a pilot study completed. The measure was designed to assess emotion recognition abilities, while attempting to reduce information-processing demands beyond those required to perceive the emotional content of stimuli. The new instrument was assessed for its psychometric properties in individuals with ID and neurotypical control participants. Initial findings supported the interrater reliability and overarching construct validity of the measure, offering strong evidence in favour of content, convergent and predictive validity. Item difficulty and discrimination analysis confirmed that the KERA included items of an appropriate level of difficulty to capture the range of emotion recognition capacities expected of individuals with mild ID. The secondary focus of the study was to assess how subtle methodological changes in the assessment of emotion recognition ability may affect emotion recognition performance, and in turn provide insight into how we might reinterpret existing ESH literature. To this end, the KERA was also applied in an investigation of the potential moderating effects of dynamic cues and emotion intensity, in addition to the assessment of the ESH. The results offer strong evidence that individuals with ID experience relative impairment in emotion recognition abilities when compared with typically developing controls. However, it remains to be seen whether the observed difficulties are specific to emotional expression or associated with more generalised facial processing. Preliminary findings also suggest that like their typically developing peers, individuals with ID benefit from higher intensity emotional displays; while in contrast, they observe no advantage from the addition of movement cues. Finally, the overarching motivation for the reassessment and improved measurement of the ESH, was in the interests of improving real-world outcomes associated with emotion recognition capacities. Accordingly, emotion recognition data were also interpreted in the context of three measures of social functioning to explore the link between social competence and emotion recognition ability. Results indicated that emotion recognition abilities are linked to outcomes in social adaptive functioning, particularly for females.
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    Computational modelling to track human emotion trajectories through time : a thesis presented to Massey University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2013) Hakim, Ayesha
    There has been a lot of research into the field of a ffective computing over the past three decades. In the context of this thesis, aff ective computing is the computing that relates to emotion recognition, representation, and analysis. Much of the past work has focused on the basic emotions. However, most human emotions are not pure examples of one basic emotion, but a mixture of them, known as complex emotions. Emotions are dynamic, they change continuously over time. This thesis focuses on computational modelling to recognise, represent, and analyse continuous spontaneous emotions through time. Emotions are internal, and hence impossible to see directly. However, there are some external presentations of emotions enabling computational tools to be used to identify them. This thesis focuses on the use of facial points as a measure of underlying emotions. The main focus is the development of computational models to track the patterns of facial changes in order to analyse the paths followed by emotions over time. While there has been lots of work on shape models to classify facial expressions into discrete basic emotion categories, they are generally based on the analysis of the full face. However, the research shows that some expressions are better recognized by muscle activity in the upper half of the face, while others use muscles primarily from the lower half of the face. This thesis introduces a joint face model based on shape models of full, upper, and lower parts of the face separately that signi cantly improves the accuracy. The set of shape models gives a degree of match to each basic emotion. Using this information, this thesis addresses the problem of complex emotion recognition by developing a mixture model that combines each basic emotion in an appropriate amount. The proposed model represents emotions in the activation-evaluation space, which is the most widely-used representation of emotions in psychological studies. It represents emotions on the basis of their polarity and similarity to each other. This thesis uses a mixture of von Mises distributions for emotion recognition, which is an approximation to the normal distribution for circular data and is the most common model for describing directional data. The results show that the proposed mixture model ts the data well. Emotions vary continuously with regard to intensity, duration, persistence with time, and other attributes. In addition, their appearance on the face varies, and the transition in facial expressions is based on both the change in emotion and physiological constraints. This thesis examines the trajectories between emotions in activation evaluation space and shows that these trajectories are smooth and follow `common' paths between different emotions. In the past, very few efforts have been made on the analysis of continuous emotion dynamics. The ndings presented in this thesis can be used and extended in several directions to improve the emotion recognition as well as emotion synthesis.