Emotional Expression Prediction and the Role of Working Memory

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Understanding the meaning of emotional facial expressions is critical for navigating our social environment efficiently. The often subtle and brief nature of facial expressions requires for sensitivemoment-to-moment monitoring, which relies on our working memory. Apart from monitoring the changes in one's emotional expression, it is also possible that we predict how emotions might unfold in the face. The role of prediction in emotion processing is not understood, but humans have been found to use their previous experiences to predict how future events might unfold. Therefore, this project will investigate how prior expectancies influence the accuracy and effectiveness by which we decipher the meaning of emerging facial expressions. Furthermore, the project will examine how limiting the availability of working memory resources influences our reliance on prior expectations. This project comprises a series of experiments, where participants will utilise different types of prior information (e.g. the likelihood of a certain facial expression appearing) to predict the unfolding emotion of a presented face, which will transform from a neutral into an emotional expression. Participants will indicate when they understand which emotion is emerging, signalling their level of sensitivity to emotion change. Moreover, the ability to adapt our prediction to account for an unexpected facial expression will be investigated.This project will result in the development of a new model of emotion prediction, which will greatly advance our understanding of emotion processing. It will also lay the foundations for clinical research on the emotion prediction processes among populations with emotion recognition impairments.