Introduction

Author(s):  
José-Miguel Fernández-Dols ◽  
James A. Russell

One of the purposes of the present book is to provide an updated review of the current psychology of facial expression and to acknowledge the growing contribution of neuroscientists, biologists, anthropologists, linguists, and other scientists to this field. Our aim was to allow the readers—from lay to practitioners to research scientists—to discover the most recent scientific developments in the field and its associated questions and controversies. As will become obvious, the most fundamental questions, such as whether “facial expressions of emotion” in fact express emotions, remain subjects of great controversy. Just as important, readers will find that new research questions and proposals are animating this field.

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-455 ◽  

Emotions are sometimes revealed through facial expressions. When these natural facial articulations involve the contraction of the same muscle groups in people of distinct cultural upbringings, this is taken as evidence of a biological origin of these emotions. While past research had identified facial expressions associated with a single internally felt category (eg, the facial expression of happiness when we feel joyful), we have recently studied facial expressions observed when people experience compound emotions (eg, the facial expression of happy surprise when we feel joyful in a surprised way, as, for example, at a surprise birthday party). Our research has identified 17 compound expressions consistently produced across cultures, suggesting that the number of facial expressions of emotion of biological origin is much larger than previously believed. The present paper provides an overview of these findings and shows evidence supporting the view that spontaneous expressions are produced using the same facial articulations previously identified in laboratory experiments. We also discuss the implications of our results in the study of psychopathologies, and consider several open research questions.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua W Maxwell ◽  
Eric Ruthruff ◽  
michael joseph

Are facial expressions of emotion processed automatically? Some authors have not found this to be the case (Tomasik et al., 2009). Here we revisited the question with a novel experimental logic – the backward correspondence effect (BCE). In three dual-task studies, participants first categorized a sound (Task 1) and then indicated the location of a target face (Task 2). In Experiment 1, Task 2 required participants to search for one facial expression of emotion (angry or happy). We observed positive BCEs, indicating that facial expressions of emotion bypassed the central attentional bottleneck and thus were processed in a capacity-free, automatic manner. In Experiment 2, we replicated this effect but found that morphed emotional expressions (which were used by Tomasik) were not processed automatically. In Experiment 3, we observed similar BCEs for another type of face processing previously shown to be capacity-free – identification of familiar faces (Jung et al., 2013). We conclude that facial expressions of emotion are identified automatically when sufficiently unambiguous.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Matsumoto ◽  
Hyisung C. Hwang

We discuss four methodological issues regarding cross-cultural judgment studies of facial expressions of emotion involving design, sampling, stimuli, and dependent variables. We use examples of relatively recent studies in this area to highlight and discuss these issues. We contend that careful consideration of these, and other, cross-cultural methodological issues can help researchers minimize methodological errors, and can guide the field to address new and different research questions that can continue to facilitate an evolution in the field’s thinking about the nature of culture, emotion, and facial expressions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Julia de Lima Bomfim ◽  
Rafaela Andreas dos Santos Ribeiro ◽  
Marcos Hortes Nisihara Chagas

Abstract Introduction The recognition of facial expressions of emotion is essential to living in society. However, individuals with major depression tend to interpret information considered imprecise in a negative light, which can exert a direct effect on their capacity to decode social stimuli. Objective To compare basic facial expression recognition skills during tasks with static and dynamic stimuli in older adults with and without major depression. Methods Older adults were selected through a screening process for psychiatric disorders at a primary care service. Psychiatric evaluations were performed using criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5). Twenty-three adults with a diagnosis of depression and 23 older adults without a psychiatric diagnosis were asked to perform two facial emotion recognition tasks using static and dynamic stimuli. Results Individuals with major depression demonstrated greater accuracy in recognizing sadness (p=0.023) and anger (p=0.024) during the task with static stimuli and less accuracy in recognizing happiness during the task with dynamic stimuli (p=0.020). The impairment was mainly related to the recognition of emotions of lower intensity. Conclusions The performance of older adults with depression in facial expression recognition tasks with static and dynamic stimuli differs from that of older adults without depression, with greater accuracy regarding negative emotions (sadness and anger) and lower accuracy regarding the recognition of happiness.


Author(s):  
Paul J. Whalen ◽  
Maital Neta ◽  
M. Justin Kim ◽  
Alison M. Mattek ◽  
F. C. Davis ◽  
...  

When it comes to being social, there is no other nonverbal environmental cue that is more important for humans than the facial expression of another person. Here we consider facial expressions as naturally conditioned stimuli that, when presented as images in an experimental paradigm, evoke neural and behavioral responses that serve to decipher the predictive meaning of the expression. We will cover data showing that the expressions of others alter our attention to the environment, our biases in interpreting these facial expressions, and our neural responses within an amygdala-prefrontal circuitry related to normal variations in reported anxiety.


1998 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 270-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari Edwards

Results of studies reported here indicate that humans are attuned to temporal cues in facial expressions of emotion. The experimental task required subjects to reproduce the actual progression of a target person's spontaneous expression (i.e., onset to offset) from a scrambled set of photographs. Each photograph depicted a segment of the expression that corresponded to approximately 67 ms in real time. Results of two experiments indicated that (a) individuals could detect extremely subtle dynamic cues in a facial expression and could utilize these cues to reproduce the proper temporal progression of the display at above-chance levels of accuracy; (b) women performed significantly better than men on the task designed to assess this ability; (c) individuals were most sensitive to the temporal characteristics of the early stages of an expression; and (d) accuracy was inversely related to the amount of time allotted for the task. The latter finding may reflect the relative involvement of (error-prone) cognitively mediated or strategic processes in what is normally a relatively automatic, nonconscious process.


2021 ◽  
pp. 104225872110297
Author(s):  
Blakley C. Davis ◽  
Benjamin J. Warnick ◽  
Aaron H. Anglin ◽  
Thomas H. Allison

Crowdfunded microlending research implies that both communal and agentic characteristics are valued. These characteristics, however, are often viewed as being at odds with one another due to their association with gender stereotypes. Drawing upon expectancy violation theory and research on gender stereotypes, we theorize that gender-counterstereotypical facial expressions of emotion provide a means for entrepreneurs to project “missing” agentic or communal characteristics. Leveraging computer-aided facial expression analysis to analyze entrepreneur photographs from 43,210 microloan appeals, we show that women benefit from stereotypically masculine facial expressions of anger and disgust, whereas men benefit from stereotypically feminine facial expressions of sadness and happiness.


2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Bimler ◽  
Galina V. Paramei

The present study investigates the perception of facial expressions of emotion, and explores the relation between the configural properties of expressions and their subjective attribution. Stimuli were a male and a female series of morphed facial expressions, interpolated between prototypes of seven emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust, and neutral) from Ekman and Friesen (1976). Topographical properties of the stimuli were quantified using the Facial Expression Measurement (FACEM) scheme. Perceived dissimilarities between the emotional expressions were elicited using a sorting procedure and processed with multidimensional scaling. Four dimensions were retained in the reconstructed facial-expression space, with positive and negative expressions opposed along D1, while the other three dimensions were interpreted as affective attributes distinguishing clusters of expressions categorized as “Surprise-Fear,” “Anger,” and “Disgust.” Significant relationships were found between these affective attributes and objective facial measures of the stimuli. The findings support a componential explanatory scheme for expression processing, wherein each component of a facial stimulus conveys an affective value separable from its context, rather than a categorical-gestalt scheme. The findings further suggest that configural information is closely involved in the decoding of affective attributes of facial expressions. Configural measures are also suggested as a common ground for dimensional as well as categorical perception of emotional faces.


2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 348-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Augusta Gaspar ◽  
Francisco G. Esteves

Prototypical facial expressions of emotion, also known as universal facial expressions, are the underpinnings of most research concerning recognition of emotions in both adults and children. Data on natural occurrences of these prototypes in natural emotional contexts are rare and difficult to obtain in adults. By recording naturalistic observations targeted at emotional contexts in day-to-day kindergarten activities, we investigated the spontaneous facial behavior of 3-year-old children in order to explore associations between context and facial activity and verify the degree of matching between the well-known adult prototypes and facial configurations actually produced by children. When taken individually, most facial actions matched those that comprise the respective emotion prototypical face, but full facial configurations with all characteristic facial actions were scarce but for joy.


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