Date of Award

Summer 2025

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Svetlana V. Shinkareva

Abstract

Emotional authenticity is a crucial element in the development and progression of social relationships. However, limited research has comprehensively examined how emotional authenticity perception is shaped by different communication channels, visual attention, and individual differences. This thesis aimed to investigate the emotional authenticity perception from multiple perspectives, including the feasibility of authenticity manipulation, the influence of multimodal cues, and visual attention allocation in assessing authenticity from facial expressions. Findings demonstrated that authenticity could be successfully manipulated by both professional and non-professional actors. Participants differentiated both authenticity and emotion most accurately in audiovisual expressions. The audio channel played an important role in distinguishing authenticity, whereas the visual channel was more important in differentiating emotion. Auditory cues were more useful for judging the authenticity of sad expressions, while visual cues were more useful for judging authenticity of happy expressions. How susceptible one is to others’ emotions, how empathetic one is, and how strongly one feels different types of emotions also influenced the authenticity judgement accuracy. Authentic expressions attracted more frequent and prolonged visual attention, while requiring less time for categorization. The eye-tracking results confirmed the importance of the upper facial region for sad expressions and the lower facial region for happy expressions. The eye-tracking also showed potentially different involvement of upper and lower facial regions depending on the authenticity of expressions.

Rights

© 2025, Sewon Oh

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