Differences between hearing and deaf subjects in decoding foreign emotional faces

Abstract

This work investigates the ability of deaf subjects to correctly label foreign emotional faces of happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, and disgust, in comparison with typically hearing ones. The experiment involved 14 deaf (signing) and 14 hearing subjects matched by age and gender. The emotional faces were selected from the Radboud Database. The results show significant difference between the two groups, with deaf performing significantly poorly in the decoding accuracy and intensity ratings of disgust, surprise, and anger. Considerations are made on the effects of the social and cultural context to leverage the universality of emotional facial expressions.