We investigated neural correlates of Emotion Recognition Accuracy (ERA) using the Assessment of Contextualized Emotions (ACE). ACE infuses context by presenting emotion expressions in a naturalistic group setting and distinguishes between accurately perceiving intended emotions (signal), and bias due to perceiving additional, secondary emotions (noise). This social perception process is argued to induce perspective taking in addition to pattern matching in ERA. Thirty participants were presented with an fMRI-compatible adaptation of the ACE consisting of blocks of neutral and emotional faces in single and group-embedded settings. Participants rated the central character's expressions categorically or using scalar scales in consequent fMRI scans. Distinct brain activations were associated with the perception of emotional vs. neutral faces in the four conditions. Moreover, accuracy and bias scores from the original ACE task performed on another day were associated with brain activation during the scalar (vs. categorical) condition for emotional (vs. neutral) faces embedded in group. These findings suggest distinct cognitive mechanisms linked to each type of emotional rating and highlight the importance of considering cognitive bias in the assessment of social emotion perception.

Department of Psychology Humboldt University Berlin Germany

Department of Psychology University of Barcelona Barcelona Spain

Department of Psychology University of Crete Rethymno Greece

Department of Psychology University of Geneva Geneva Switzerland

Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas Greece

Institute of Computer Science Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas Greece

Medical School University of Crete Voutes Campus Heraklion Greece

Psychology Department Palacký University Olomouc Czechia

School of Psychology Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Thessaloniki Greece

Swiss Center of Affective Sciences University of Geneva Geneva Switzerland

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