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The University of Southampton
Psychology

Research project: Emotion discrimination in anxiety and prosopagnosia

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The aim of these projects is to investigate the perception and discrimination of emotion in anxiety and in prosopagnosia.

We examine the perception of emotion intensity using a threshold task, and discrimination of different emotions using a multidimensional scaling procedure.

In one project, we use these methods to answer questions about anxiety and emotion processing. Do anxious participants show differential performance for perception of emotion intensity? Does the emotional expression space differ for anxious participants, and if so, how?

In a sister project we consider possible relationships between a prosopagnosic individual’s (PHD) emotion perception and his inability to discriminate Thatcherised from normal faces. Results for PHD reveal a within category deficit for intensity of disgust and anger, poor sensitivity when discriminating faces as one of two negative emotions. In addition, a different solution for PHD, relative to controls, was found in a multidimensional scaling study for sameness judgements of faces varying in emotion identity and intensity.

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