How Do Humans Perceive Emotion?

[Abstract] Emotion carries crucial qualities of the human condition, representing one of the major challenges in artificial intelligence. Research in psychology and neuroscience in the past two to three decades has generated rich insights into the processes underlying human emotion. Cognition and emotion represent the two main pillars of the human psyche and human intelligence. While the human cognitive system and cognitive brain has inspired and informed computer science and artificial intelligence, the future is ripe for the human emotion system to be integrated into artificial intelligence and robotic systems. Here, we review behavioral and neural findings in human emotion perception, including facial emotion perception, olfactory emotion perception, multimodal emotion perception, and the time course of emotion perception. It is our hope that knowledge of how humans perceive emotion will help bring artificial intelligence strides closer to human intelligence.

[Keywords] emotion perception; faces; smells; time course; neural basis