Emotional Expression Prediction and the Role of Working Memory

理解情绪面部表情的含义对于有效地驾驭我们的社会环境至关重要。面部表情通常是微妙而短暂的，这需要我们对每一刻的敏感监控，这依赖于我们的工作记忆。除了监测一个人情绪表达的变化，我们也有可能预测情绪如何在脸上展开。预测在情绪处理中的作用尚不清楚，但人们已经发现，人类会利用以往的经验来预测未来事件的发展。因此，本项目将研究先验预期如何影响我们破译新出现的面部表情的准确性和有效性。此外，该项目将研究限制工作记忆资源的可用性如何影响我们对先前预期的依赖。这个项目包括一系列的实验，参与者将利用不同类型的先验信息（例如，某种面部表情出现的可能性）来预测呈现的面部情绪的展开，这种情绪将从中性表情转变为情绪表情。参与者将表明他们何时理解出现了哪种情绪，表明他们对情绪变化的敏感程度。此外，调整我们的预测以解释意外面部表情的能力将被研究。这个项目将导致一种新的情绪预测模型的发展，这将极大地促进我们对情绪处理的理解。这也将为情绪识别障碍人群情绪预测过程的临床研究奠定基础。

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.