Visual perception reveals a paradoxical relationship between emotions and our sense of the persisting “self”

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Jocelyn Zhang¹ (jocelynzhang0904@gmail.com), Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco; ¹The University of British Columbia

People can seem “not quite like themselves” when moved by grief or anger. How do emotions (which we typically think of as transient) interact with our notion of who a person is over time (which we typically think of as stable)? Questions on identity are long-standing philosophical puzzles that are difficult to explore empirically. Here, we take a novel experimental approach inspired by work in visual perception, where identity can instead be thought of in terms of *perceptual correspondence*: is an object that passes behind an occluder the same object that leaves? We investigated how emotions might interact with perceptual correspondence in *people*, not just objects. We first verified that perceptual correspondence is disrupted with a switch in actual facial identity across the occluder, after which we tested this in the context of emotions. The face could either maintain its emotional expression, or undergo an emotional transition (e.g., start neutral and become sad). In theory, we should observe perceptual correspondence, since facial identity remains the same—unless emotions are encoded uniquely in perception. Results revealed this striking pattern, where perceptual correspondence disappeared when the face’s emotion changed, despite preserved facial identity. This generalized to other emotional transitions, and did not occur for other visually equivalent changes that should be extrinsic to identity (e.g., changes in shadows cast on the face). These results provide a new way of understanding identity: a person’s persisting “self” may be more paradoxically tied to the transient ebb and flow of their emotions over time.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Person perception