The team came to a surprising conclusion: at first, as the intensity of the emotions increased, participants’ ability to judge them also improved, attaining a kind of ‘sweet spot’ in perceiving moderate to strong emotions. When the emotions became maximally intense, however, their legibility decreased quite drastically. Lead author Natalie Holz of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics explains:
"Counterintuitively, we found that maximally intense emotions are not the easiest to infer meaning from. In fact, they are the most ambiguous of all.”
