Knowledge of individuals as a constraining factor in an integrative hierarchical predictive account of emotion identification and its deficits.

The ability to identify others' emotional states is key to social interaction, with deficits in this ability causing impaired social functioning and distress. Decades of research into this ability and
deficits in it have focused on perceptual cues to emotion - in particular, facial expression - using isolated and anonymous perceptual stimuli. The extent to which we might draw upon other,
conceptual, information when inferring emotion is not yet well understood. Specifically, no research to date has investigated the effect that knowledge of an individual might have on inference
of their emotion. This is surprising, since we possess information about a number of individuating factors such as personality traits and culture that are likely to affect what individuals feel in
response to particular situations, how rapidly their emotions change, and how they express emotions. The current research outlines and tests a predictive coding framework under which perceptual, contextual, temporal and person-related cues are drawn upon and integrated to infer emotion in those with typical and atypical emotion identification. Specifically, I hypothesise that emotional inference will vary as a function of induced beliefs about the target's traits, with this factor being integrated with other cues as suggested by the predictive coding framework, shown by manipulation of different factors' relative precision.