Quantifying Facial Expression Intensity and Signal Use in Deaf Signers

We live in a world of rich dynamic multisensory signals. Hearing individuals rapidly and effectively integrate multimodal signals to decode biologically relevant facial expressions of emotion. Yet, it remains unclear how facial expressions are decoded by deaf adults in the absence of an auditory sensory channel. We thus compared early and profoundly deaf signers (n = 46) with hearing nonsigners (n = 48) on a psychophysical task designed to...