Understanding Multimodal Emotional Expressions

Author(s):  
Dacher Keltner ◽  
Daniel T. Cordaro

In this chapter we review recent advances in basic emotion theory, which holds that humans have evolved a limited set of emotional expressions that serve important communicative functions within social interactions. Our review highlights recent evidence showing that a much wider array of emotions than previously thought—up to 15—have distinct displays that are recognized across different cultures. The new science of expression reveals that new modalities—tactile communication and vocalization—likewise signal a variety of emotions. Our review also brings into focus how emotions may be signaled in specific modalities, and likely sources of cultural accents in emotional expression.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Martin

The goal of this study was to determine if emotional expressions at the end of swimmers’ 2016 Paralympic races varied according to medal won and if their race wins and losses were close or not close. Using FaceReader software, videos of 46 races of medal-winning Paralympic (M age = 24.6; SD = 5.4) swimmers’ faces (78 males and 60 females) from 22 countries were analyzed. Silver medalists were angrier and sadder than gold medalists and angrier and more disgusted than bronze medalists. Swimmers who swam slower than their 2015 best time were angrier than Paralympians who swam faster. Paralympians who finished lower than their 2015 world ranking had more neutral emotions and were less happy than Paralympians who finished higher. Gold medalists who narrowly defeated silver medalists were less happy and more fearful than gold medalists who won easily. Bronze medalists with close wins had fewer neutral emotions and were happier, less angry, and more surprised than bronze medalists with not-close wins. All medalists with close wins were more surprised than medalists with easier wins. Bronze medalists with close losses to silver medalists were happier and less angry than bronze medalists who lost more easily. Effect sizes ranged from d = 0.27 to 1.01. These results provide theoretical support to basic emotion theory and confirm the anecdotal observations that Paralympic competition generates wide-ranging and diverse emotions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dacher Keltner ◽  
Disa Sauter ◽  
Jessica Tracy ◽  
Alan Cowen

Author(s):  
Eleonora Cannoni ◽  
Giuliana Pinto ◽  
Anna Silvia Bombi

AbstractThis study was aimed at verifying if children introduce emotional expressions in their drawings of human faces, and if a preferential expression exists; we also wanted to verify if children’s pictorial choices change with increasing age. To this end we examined the human figure drawings made by 160 boys and 160 girls, equally divided in 4 age groups: 6–7; 8–9; 10–11; 12–13 years; mean ages (SD in parentheses) were: 83,30 (6,54); 106,14 (7,16) 130,49 (8,26); 155,40 (6,66). Drawings were collected with the Draw-a-Man test instructions, i.e. without mentioning an emotional characterization. In the light of data from previous studies of emotion drawing on request, and the literature about preferred emotional expressions, we expected that an emotion would be portrayed even by the younger participants, and that the preferred emotion would be happiness. We also expected that with the improving ability to keep into account both mouth and eyes appearance, other expressions would be found besides the smiling face. Data were submitted to non-parametric tests to compare the frequencies of expressions (absolute and by age) and the frequencies of visual cues (absolute and by age and expressions). The results confirmed that only a small number of faces were expressionless, and that the most frequent emotion was happiness. However, with increasing age this representation gave way to a variety of basic emotions (sadness, fear, anger, surprise), whose representation may depend from the ability to modify the shapes of both eyes and mouth and changing communicative aims of the child.


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Annalie Botha

From “How was your day?” to “Remember the time we …”, we use stories as a way to share our experiences, understandings and concerns with others. Stories extend our knowledge and understanding of other people and situations, other culturesand languages by including the emotional expressions of factual information. When so much of family and community life in South Africa remains insular and disconnected from other cultures, other languages and other belief systems, storiescan extend boundaries beyond our single perspectives and experiences to the varying perspectives of others. This becomes particularly important for teachers of young children who may have very different life experiences from those of the children they teach. In this project, we examined storytelling as a way to cross-cultural boundaries and of harnessing the diverse worlds of South African citizens pedagogically. We asked fourth year students in a Foundation Phase teacher education programme to identify a person from a different cultural and linguistic group; and to have that person share a story with them to discover how the experience of listening to stories from different cultures, languages, and belief systems might influence their attitudes towards teaching children with those characteristic differences.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caruana Fausto

A common view in affective neuroscience considers emotions as a multifaceted phenomenon constituted by independent affective and motor components. Such dualistic connotation, obtained by rephrasing the classic Darwin and James’s theories of emotion, leads to the assumption that emotional expression is controlled by motor centers in the anterior cingulate, frontal operculum, and supplementary motor area, whereas emotional experience depends on interoceptive centers in the insula. Recent stimulation studies provide a different perspective. I will outline two sets of findings. First, affective experiences can be elicited also following the stimulation of motor centers. Second, emotional expressions can be elicited by stimulating interoceptive regions. Echoing the original pragmatist theories of emotion, I will make a case for the notion that emotional experience emerges from the integration of sensory and motor signals, encoded in the same functional network.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 570-590
Author(s):  
Afsaneh Raissi ◽  
Jennifer R. Steele

Given the pervasiveness of prejudice, researchers have become increasingly interested in examining racial bias at the intersection of race and other social and perceptual categories that have the potential to disrupt these negative attitudes. Across three studies, we examined whether the emotional expression of racial exemplars would moderate implicit racial bias. We found that racial bias on the Affect Misattribution Procedure only emerged in response to angry but not smiling Black male faces in comparison to White (Study 1) or White and Asian (Study 3) male faces with similar emotional expressions. Racial bias was also found toward Asian targets (Studies 2 and 3), but not only following angry primes. These findings suggest that negative stereotypes about Black men can create a contrast effect, making racial bias toward smiling faces less likely to be expressed in the presence of angry Black male faces.


2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (7) ◽  
pp. 2547-2560
Author(s):  
R. Thora Bjornsdottir ◽  
Nicholas O. Rule

Abstract Heterosexual individuals tend to look and act more typical for their gender compared to gay and lesbian individuals, and people use this information to infer sexual orientation. Consistent with stereotypes associating happy expressions with femininity, previous work found that gay men displayed more happiness than straight men—a difference that perceivers used, independent of gender typicality, to judge sexual orientation. Here, we extended this to judgments of women’s sexual orientation. Like the gender-inversion stereotypes applied to men, participants perceived women’s faces manipulated to look angry as more likely to be lesbians; however, emotional expressions largely did not distinguish the faces of actual lesbian and straight women. Compared to men’s faces, women’s faces varied less in their emotional expression (appearing invariably positive) but varied more in gender typicality. These differences align with gender role expectations requiring the expression of positive emotion by women and prohibiting the expression of femininity by men. More important, greater variance within gender typicality and emotion facilitates their respective utility for distinguishing sexual orientation from facial appearance. These findings thus provide the first evidence for contrasting cues to women’s and men’s sexual orientation and suggest that gender norms may uniquely shape how men and women reveal their sexual orientation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabet Serrat ◽  
Anna Amadó ◽  
Carles Rostan ◽  
Beatriz Caparrós ◽  
Francesc Sidera

This study aims to further understand children’s capacity to identify and reason about pretend emotions by analyzing which sources of information they take into account when interpreting emotions simulated in pretend play contexts. A total of 79 children aged 3 to 8 participated in the final sample of the study. They were divided into the young group (ages 3 to 5) and the older group (6 to 8). The children were administered a facial emotion recognition task, a pretend emotions task, and a non-verbal cognitive ability test. In the pretend emotions task, the children were asked whether the protagonist of silent videos, who was displaying pretend emotions (pretend anger and pretend sadness), was displaying a real or a pretend emotion, and to justify their answer. The results show significant differences in the children’s capacity to identify and justify pretend emotions according to age and type of emotion. The data suggest that young children recognize pretend sadness, but have more difficulty detecting pretend anger. In addition, children seem to find facial information more useful for the detection of pretend sadness than pretend anger, and they more often interpret the emotional expression of the characters in terms of pretend play. The present research presents new data about the recognition of negative emotional expressions of sadness and anger and the type of information children take into account to justify their interpretation of pretend emotions, which consists not only in emotional expression but also contextual information.


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-265
Author(s):  
Xinyin Chen

In this article, I discuss major theoretical and methodological issues in the study of cultural meanings of children’s behaviors. Research in this area is conducted mainly through assessing individual beliefs using hypothetical vignettes or other self-report methods. I argue that it is important to investigate functional meanings of children’s behaviors from a contextual-developmental perspective, which emphasizes the role of social and developmental processes in mediating links between culture and behaviors. Information about the relevance of behaviors to social interactions and relationships and to the development of adjustment outcomes in different cultures helps us understand the nature of the behaviors beyond individual views. Such understanding is crucial for interpreting cross-cultural differences and similarities in the display of adaptive and maladaptive behaviors.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S420-S420
Author(s):  
Kyung Hee Lee ◽  
Ji Yeon Lee ◽  
Bora Kim ◽  
Marie Boltz

Abstract Although dementia-related language, comprehension, and memory deficits occur fairly early stage in dementia, persons with dementia retain the ability to express their emotion even in the late stage of disease. However, health care providers do not know how to interpret emotional expressions that could be utilized as important signals of underlying needs and care preferences in persons with dementia. The purpose of this study was to explore the event-specific emotional expressions of persons with dementia in long-term care over a 6-month period. This was a longitudinal study using repeated observations. Emotional expressions were videotaped when three specific events (personal care, meal time, and activity) occurred at baseline, month 3 and month 6. A total of nine observations was made for each participant. We enrolled 13 participants so far; ten participants were completed 6 month follow up. The mean score of MMSE at baseline was 4.38; that of ADL was 16.62. On average, persons with dementia showed 9.93 episodes of positive emotional expression (PEE) per minute and 1.81 episodes of negative emotional expression (NEE) per minute. We found between person variations for both PEE and NEE. PEE and NEE were different by three types of events. Specifically, persons with dementia showed more PEE with activity than personal care and meal time and more NEE with personal care than the other two events. This study will provide better understanding of event-specific emotional expressions, and inform the development of emotion-oriented interventions programs to improve the psychological well-being of persons with dementia.


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