USE OF SIGN LANGUAGE DOES NOT FAVOR RECOGNITION OF STATIC AND DYNAMIC EMOTIONAL FACES IN DEAF

Facial expressions are especially relevant for deaf people because, in addition to the emotional content, they assume linguistic functions exclusive to sign languages. In the present study, we investigated the recognition of static (photographs) and dynamic (videos) facial expressions in: 1) deaf signers with profound congenital or early-acquired deafness (up to 2 years of age); 2) hearing individuals who knew sign language; and 3) hearing individuals who did not know sign language. Facial expressions of joy, sadness, fear, and anger in static and dynamic conditions were presented at 4 intensities (25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%). In the dynamic condition, we found that deaf individuals had lower recognition scores compared to the other two groups of hearing individuals (p < .05). However, in the static condition, no differences between groups were found (p > .05). Those results indicate that the use of facial expressions in sign language does not necessarily favor emotion recognition, probably because facial expressions have linguistic properties not related to emotional content.