Profound Individual Differences in Contextualized Emotion Perception

Emotion perception is a fundamental aspect of our lives because others’ emotions may provide important information about their reactions, attitudes, intentions, and behavior. Following the seminal work of Ekman, much of the research on emotion perception has focused on facial expressions. Recent evidence suggests, however, that facial expressions may be more ambiguous than previously assumed and that context also plays an important role in deciphering the emotional states of others. Here, we adopt a novel approach, breaking down the means and documenting a robust trait in emotion perception. In six experiments with 671 participants, we find evidence for striking individual differences in emotion perception, with different people presenting profound differences in weighting the face versus the extrafacial context. Importantly, these differences are stable over time, stimuli, and paradigms. Our data show that individuals are interpreting identical emotional displays as communicating different emotions. Implications of these robust differences are discussed.