Emotions at fingertips
DANNYELLE: Hello, I am Dannyelle Valente. I am a lecturer in Psychology at Université Lumière Lyon 2 and also associate researcher at University of Geneva. For three minutes, my colleagues and I, will present a research project. Emotion at fingertips, recognition of emotional facial expressions by touch. Emotional competence can be defined by the way individuals express, identify, understand and regulate their emotions, and those of others. We know that a good emotional competence has an important impact in social, psychological and academic fields. General question of our research is "What role would the visual experience play in the development of emotional competence?" Regarding expressions of emotion in blindness, our review of studies have shown that visual learning seems to not be necessary to produce the universal patterns of expressions. This joins the exciting debate, that has existed since Darwin, about nature of emotions. But what do we know about identification of emotions in blind people? Studies have examined discrimination of expressions displayed in real faces, 3D facemasks and even in Tactile drawings. However, majority of the studies have been conducted with blindfolded sighted subjects, none with blind children. In a pilot study, we examined the recognition of Tactile drawings of emotions by children. Participants are 7 blind and 10 sighted children, aged 7 to 11. I present here, the Tested tactile drawings, from left to right, emotions are happiness, disgust, anger, sadness, surprise and fear. And here are some preliminary results. We found a significant difference between groups, sighted children performed better than blind children. Visual experience seems to play a role here, certainly also related to the nature of this stimulus. The recognition of 2D representations codes is difficult for blind people. You are currently analysing the most touched face attributes for each emotion. We all asked to compare areas of interest in tactile and visual exploration. A wider knowledge of the role of other sensory channels, such as touch, on development of emotional competence, would allow the implementation of communication strategies and most sensory tools, more suited for blind people. Thank you very much for your attention