Medical Xpress March 13, 2025
A new study challenges the longstanding belief that fear is primarily communicated through facial expressions, showing instead that context plays the dominant role in real-life fear recognition.
By analyzing real-life fear reactions in videos, researchers found that facial expressions alone fail to reliably signal fear, whereas situational context—such as the environment and body posture—allows for clear and accurate fear perception.
These findings have major implications for psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, suggesting that current emotion recognition models, including AI-based systems, need to incorporate contextual information rather than relying solely on facial cues. Recognizing fear in others is crucial for survival, but how is this achieved?
A new study published in PNAS, led by Professor Hillel Aviezer and Ph.D. student Maya...
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