Communicating emotion through facial expressions: Social consequences and neural correlates

Individuals modulate their facial emotion expressions in the presence of other people. Does this social tuning reflect changes in emotional experiences or attempts to communicate emotions to others? Here, “target” participants underwent facial electromyography (EMG) recording while viewing emotion-inducing images, believing they were either visible or not visible to “observer” participants. In Study 1, when targets believed they were visible, they produced greater EMG activity and were more accurately perceived by observers, but did not report accompanying changes in their emotion experience. In Study 2, simultaneous facial EMG recording and fMRI scanning revealed that social tuning of targets’ facial expressions correlated with activity in brain structures associated with mentalizing. These findings speak to long-standing, competing accounts of emotion expression, and suggest that individuals actively tune their facial expressions in social settings to communicate their experiences to others.

Exposure to Biracial Faces Reduces Colorblindness

Across six studies, we demonstrate that exposure to biracial individuals significantly reduces endorsement of colorblindness as a racial ideology among White individuals. Real-world exposure to biracial individuals predicts lower levels of colorblindness compared with White and Black exposure (Study 1). Brief manipulated exposure to images of biracial faces reduces colorblindness compared with exposure to White faces, Black faces, a set of diverse monoracial faces, or abstract images (Studies 2-5). In addition, these effects occur only when a biracial label is paired with the face rather than resulting from the novelty of the mixed-race faces themselves (Study 4). Finally, we show that the shift in White participants’ colorblindness attitudes is driven by social tuning, based on participants’ expectations that biracial individuals are lower in colorblindness than monoracial individuals (Studies 5-6). These studies suggest that the multiracial population’s increasing size and visibility has the potential to positively shift racial attitudes.