Are you a social savant who easily reads people’s emotions? Or are you someone who leaves an interaction with an unclear understanding of another person’s emotional state?
New UC Berkeley research suggests those differences stem from a fundamental way our brains compute facial and contextual details, potentially explaining why some people are better at reading the room than others — sometimes, much better.
Human brains use information from faces and background context, such as the location or expressions of bystanders, when making sense of a scene and assessing someone’s emotional state. If someone’s facial expression is clear, but the emotional information in the context is unclear, most people’s brains will heavily weigh the clear facial expression and minimize the importance of the background context. Conversely, if a facial expression is ambiguous but the background context provides strong cues of how a person feels, they’ll rely more on the context to understand the person’s emotions.