Facial Expressivity at 4 Months: A Context by Expression Analysis

The specificity predicted by differential emotions theory (DET) for early facial expressions in response to 5 different eliciting situations was studied in a sample of 4‐month‐old infants (n = 150). Infants were videotaped during tickle, sour taste, jack‐in‐the‐box, arm restraint, and masked‐stranger situations and their expressions were coded second by second. Infants showed a variety of facial expressions in each situation; however, more infants exhibited positive (joy and surprise) than negative expressions (anger, disgust, fear, and sadness) across all situations except sour taste. Consistent with DET‐predicted specificity, joy expressions were the most common in response to tickling, and were less common in response to other situations. Surprise expressions were the most common in response to the jack‐in‐the‐box, as predicted, but also were the most common in response to the arm restraint and masked‐stranger situations, indicating a lack of specificity. No evidence of predicted specificity was found for anger, disgust, fear, and sadness expressions. Evidence of individual differences in expressivity within situations, as well as stability in the pattern across situations, underscores the need to examine both child and contextual factors in studying emotional development. The results provide little support for the DET postulate of situational specificity and suggest that a synthesis of differential emotions and dynamic systems theories of emotional expression should be considered.     

The Contribution of Emotion Perceptions and Their Overgeneralizations to Trait Impressions

This study tested the hypothesis derived from ecological theory that adaptive social perceptions of emotion expressions fuel trait impressions. Moreover, it was predicted that these impressions would be overgeneralized and perceived in faces that were not intentionally posing expressions but nevertheless varied in emotional demeanor. To test these predictions, perceivers viewed 32 untrained targets posing happy, surprised, angry, sad, and fearful expressions and formed impressions of their dominance and affiliation. When targets posed happiness and surprise they were perceived as high in dominance and affiliation whereas when they posed anger they were perceived as high in dominance and low in affiliation. When targets posed sadness and fear they were perceived as low in dominance. As predicted, many of these impressions were overgeneralized and attributed to targets who were not posing expressions. The observed effects were generally independent of the impact of other facial cues (i.e., attractiveness and babyishness).     

Young people,emotional suspicion and the emergence of paediatric selfhood in Palestine

This paper explores young people's relationships to emotions and mental health care in Ramallah, Palestine. Palestinian young people—via public anger, sadness, or even joy—are often marked as emotionally other in familial, institutional and other public spaces as part of NGO-driven constructions of emerging paediatric selfhood. In response, they reproduce and/or reframe notions of emotional suspicion that underwrite these marginalizing processes. Thinking along such axes as possibility and impossibility; mobility and immobility; and the local and international, they simultaneously integrate and resist representational subjection, which is an important part of understanding broader post-Oslo Palestinian identity and community formation.     

Maternal Punitive Reactions to Children's Negative Emotions and Young Adult Trait Anger: Effect of Gender and Emotional Closeness

The current study tested whether young adult's recollected reports of their mother's punitive reactions to their negative emotions in childhood predicted anger expression in young adulthood and whether emotional closeness weakens this association. Further, a three-way interaction was tested to examine whether emotional closeness is a stronger protective factor for young women than for young men. Results revealed a significant three-way interaction (gender × emotional closeness × maternal punitive reactions). For young men, maternal punitive reactions to negative emotions were directly associated with increased anger expressions. Maternal punitive reactions to young women's negative emotions in childhood were associated with increased anger in adulthood only when they reported low maternal emotional closeness. Findings suggest that maternal emotional closeness may serve as a buffer against the negative effects of maternal punitive reactions for women's anger expression in young adulthood.     

Marital Conflict and Children's Emotions: The Development of an Anger Organization

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between anger‐based marital conflict and the development of an anger organization in children between the ages of 4 and 8 years old. Anger organization was defined as an adversarial approach to relationships demonstrated through (a) short‐term anger expressions during social interaction and (b) aggression in relationships. Seventy‐one children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, their mothers, and their teachers participated in the study. Mothers completed questionnaires on anger‐based marital conflict and on children's aggression. Sociometric ratings of anger and aggression were obtained from peers. Teachers supplied reports of children's aggression. Children's short‐term emotional expression and the circumstances that elicited emotions were observed during peer interaction. Anger‐based marital conflict was found to be strongly associated with peer, maternal, and teacher reports of aggression, but not with reports of internalizing symptomatology. Anger‐based marital conflict was also associated with short‐term anger expressions, but not with short‐term expressions of sadness. I argue that children develop an emotional organization in which anger predominates when they are exposed to high levels of anger‐based marital conflict.     

Expressing Induced Emotions Through Free Dance Movement

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of two basic emotions, happiness and sadness, on dance movement. A total of 32 adult participants were induced to feel emotional states of either happiness or sadness and then danced intuitively to an emotionally ‘neutral’ piece of music, composed specifically for the experiment. Based on an Effort-Shape analysis of body movement, full body movement was captured and seven different movement cues were examined, in order to explore whether differences in corporeal articulations between the happy and sad condition existed. Results revealed that in the happy condition, participants moved faster, with more acceleration, and made more expanded and more impulsive movements than in the sad condition. Results are discussed with respect to possible consequences for future research on human movement.     

Normlessness,Anomie, and the Emotions

In Suicide, Durkheim described two qualitatively different experiences of normative anomie, each with a distinct affective basis: an intentional, if not ruthless, disdain for society's normative order; and an unintentional disregard for, or confusion about, norms or rules of conduct. We generalize Durkheim's classification of the socioaffective aspects of anomic suicide, and present two theoretical models of normlessness‐anomie and the emotions. These models posit that intentional anomie involves the primary emotions anger, disgust, and joy‐happiness; these emotions can combine to form the secondary emotions contempt, pride, and derisiveness. Unintentional, passive anomie rather involves the emotions surprise, fear, and sadness; these can combine to form the secondary emotions disappointment, shame, and alarm. We additionally hypothesize that each kind of anomie has distinct potential behavioral consequences: intentional anomie can result in immorality, shamelessness, acquisitiveness, and premeditated homicidality; unintentional anomie, in depression, confusion, uncertainty, unpremeditated homicidality, and suicidality.     

Competent and Warm but Unemotional: The Influence of Occupational Stereotypes on the Attribution of Emotions

The present research aims to assess how occupational stereotypes, and in particular, stereotypes about doctors, influence the observers’ perception of the emotions expressed by members of this group. For this, 60 men and women judged the emotions of women who expressed either happiness, anger, sadness, or a neutral expression and whose faces were either uncovered or covered with a surgical mask, a niqab, or a hat and scarf such that only an identical portion of the face around the eyes was visible. Congruent with the occupational stereotype, women dressed as doctors were perceived highest on competence and warmth, but also as emotionally restrained such that they were rated as experiencing lower levels of emotions relative to the same women wearing other face covers or with uncovered faces.     

Feeling Social Movements: Theoretical Contributions to Social Movement Research on Emotions

Recent literature provides evidence that emotions are intrinsic to the constitution of social movements. The present review examines how scholars theorize emotions in their empirical studies and focuses on the following topics: emotion work, emotional framing, emotional cultures and emotional opportunity structures. The combination of several constructs in the analysis of emotions signals a shift toward integration of preexisting perspectives common in the field of social movements.     

Categorical Perception of Facial Emotions in Infancy

Categorical perception, indicated by superior discrimination between stimuli that cross categorical boundaries than between stimuli within a category, is an efficient manner of classification. The current study examined the development of categorical perception of emotional stimuli in infancy. We used morphed facial images to investigate whether infants find contrasts between emotional facial images that cross categorical boundaries to be more salient than those that do not, while matching the degree of differences in the two contrasts. Five‐month‐olds exhibited sensitivity to the categorical boundary between sadness and disgust, between happiness and surprise, as well as between sadness and anger but not between anger and disgust. Even 9‐month‐olds failed to exhibit evidence of a definitive category boundary between anger and disgust. These findings indicate the presence of discrete boundaries between some, but not all, of the basic emotions early in life. Implications of these findings for the major theories of emotion representation are discussed.     

Perception of Emotions in the Hand Movement Quality of Finnish Sign Language

This study investigated whether people can decode emotion (happiness, neutrality, and anger) communicated via hand movements in Finnish sign language when these emotions are expressed in semantically neutral sentences. Twenty volunteer participants without any knowledge of sign language took part in the experiment. The results indicated that the subjects were able to reliably decode anger and neutrality from the quality of hand movements. For happy hand expressions, the responses of happiness and neutrality were confused. Thus, the study showed that emotion-related information can be encoded in the quality of hand movements during signing and that this information can be decoded without previous experience with this particular mode of communication.     

Spontaneous Facial Expressions Reveal New Action Units for the Sad Experiences

Facial expressions related to sadness are a universal signal of nonverbal communication. Although results of many psychology studies have shown that drooping of the lip corners, raising of the chin, and oblique eyebrow movements (a combination of inner brow raising and brow lowering) express sadness, no report has described a study elucidating facial expression characteristics under well-controlled circumstances with people actually experiencing the emotion of sadness itself. Therefore, spontaneous facial expressions associated with sadness remain unclear. We conducted this study to accumulate important findings related to spontaneous facial expressions of sadness. We recorded the spontaneous facial expressions of a group of participants as they experienced sadness during an emotion-elicitation task. This task required a participant to recall neutral and sad memories while listening to music. We subsequently conducted a detailed analysis of their sad and neutral expressions using the Facial Action Coding System. The prototypical facial expressions of sadness in earlier studies were not observed when people experienced sadness as an internal state under non-social circumstances. By contrast, they expressed tension around the mouth, which might function as a form of suppression. Furthermore, results show that parts of these facial actions are not only related to sad experiences but also to other emotional experiences such as disgust, fear, anger, and happiness. This study revealed the possibility that new facial expressions contribute to the experience of sadness as an internal state.     

Vocal Cues Underlying Youth and Adult Portrayals of Socio-emotional Expressions

Despite known differences in the acoustic properties of children’s and adults’ voices, no work to date has examined the vocal cues associated with emotional prosody in youth. The current study investigated whether child (n = 24, 17 female, aged 9–15) and adult (n = 30, 15 female, aged 18–63) actors differed in the vocal cues underlying their portrayals of basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) and social expressions (meanness, friendliness). We also compared the acoustic characteristics of meanness and friendliness to comparable basic emotions. The pattern of distinctions between expressions varied as a function of age for voice quality and mean pitch. Specifically, adults’ portrayals of the various expressions were more distinct in mean pitch than children’s, whereas children’s representations differed more in voice quality than adults’. Given the importance of pitch variables for the interpretation of a speaker’s intended emotion, expressions generated by adults may thus be easier for listeners to decode than those of children. Moreover, the vocal cues associated with the social expressions of meanness and friendliness were distinct from those of basic emotions like anger and happiness respectively. Overall, our findings highlight marked differences in the ways in which adults and children convey socio-emotional expressions vocally, and expand our understanding of the communication of paralanguage in social contexts. Implications for the literature on emotion recognition are discussed.     

Emotion Recognition in Nonverbal Face-to-Face Communication

The perception of emotional facial expressions may activate corresponding facial muscles in the receiver, also referred to as facial mimicry. Facial mimicry is highly dependent on the context and type of facial expressions. While previous research almost exclusively investigated mimicry in response to pictures or videos of emotional expressions, studies with a real, face-to-face partner are still rare. Here we compared facial mimicry of angry, happy, and sad expressions and emotion recognition in a dyadic face-to-face setting. In sender-receiver dyads, we recorded facial electromyograms in parallel. Senders communicated to the receivers—with facial expressions only—the emotions felt during specific personal situations in the past, eliciting anger, happiness, or sadness. Receivers mostly mimicked happiness, to a lesser degree, sadness, and anger as the least mimicked emotion. In actor-partner interdependence models we showed that the receivers’ own facial activity influenced their ratings, which increased the agreement between the senders’ and receivers’ ratings for happiness, but not for angry and sad expressions. These results are in line with the Emotion Mimicry in Context View, holding that humans mimic happy expressions according to affiliative intentions. The mimicry of sad expressions is less intense, presumably because it signals empathy and might imply personal costs. Direct anger expressions are mimicked the least, possibly because anger communicates threat and aggression. Taken together, we show that incidental facial mimicry in a face-to-face setting is positively related to the recognition accuracy for non-stereotype happy expressions, supporting the functionality of facial mimicry.     

Effort-Shape Characteristics of Emotion-Related Body Movement

The purpose of this study was to characterize the movement qualities of 5 target emotions during walking. We used an autobiographical memories paradigm for elicitation and observer judgments for emotion recognition. For each of the felt and recognized emotion portrayals, 6 Effort-Shape qualities were judged on a continuum between opposite qualities at the anchor points. Three general categories of movement style emerged, so that anger and joy shared anchor qualities at one end of the continuum, sadness had qualities at the opposite anchor, and content and neutral had qualities between the anchor extremes. The Effort-Shape profiles were unique for each target emotion, however, and mean scores were different between emotions even when emotions shared similar qualities. Emotions were classified using the Effort-Shape scores with accuracies ranging from 74–32 % for sad, anger, content and joy, respectively. For most of the target emotions, decoding accuracy was related to at least 4 Effort-Shape qualities, suggesting that decoding accuracy may be associated with a profile of movement qualities. This study highlights the importance of movement quality in bodily expression of emotion and demonstrates the effectiveness of Effort-Shape analysis in distinguishing among emotion-related movement styles.     

Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language

Expressions of basic emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) can be recognized pan-culturally from the face and it is assumed that these emotions can be recognized from a speaker’s voice, regardless of an individual’s culture or linguistic ability. Here, we compared how monolingual speakers of Argentine Spanish recognize basic emotions from pseudo-utterances (“nonsense speech”) produced in their native language and in three foreign languages (English, German, Arabic). Results indicated that vocal expressions of basic emotions could be decoded in each language condition at accuracy levels exceeding chance, although Spanish listeners performed significantly better overall in their native language (“in-group advantage”). Our findings argue that the ability to understand vocally-expressed emotions in speech is partly independent of linguistic ability and involves universal principles, although this ability is also shaped by linguistic and cultural variables.

The Intensity of Emotional Facial Expressions and Decoding Accuracy

The influence of the physical intensity of emotional facial expressions on perceived intensity and emotion category decoding accuracy was assessed for expressions of anger, disgust, sadness, and happiness. The facial expressions of two men and two women posing each of the four emotions were used as stimuli. Six different levels of intensity of expression were created for each pose using a graphics morphing program. Twelve men and 12 women rated each of the 96 stimuli for perceived intensity of the underlying emotion and for the qualitative nature of the emotion expressed. The results revealed that perceived intensity varied linearly with the manipulated physical intensity of the expression. Emotion category decoding accuracy varied largely linearly with the manipulated physical intensity of the expression for expressions of anger, disgust, and sadness. For the happiness expressions only, the findings were consistent with a categorical judgment process. Sex of encoder produced significant effects for both dependent measures. These effects remained even after possible gender differences in encoding were controlled for, suggesting a perceptual bias on the part of the decoders.     

Posthypnotic suggestion: A method for the study of nonverbal communication

A method for studying emotional expression using posthypnotic suggestion to induce emotional states is presented. Subjects were videotaped while roleplaying happiness, sadness or anger or after hypnotic induction of one of these three emotions. Judges then rated these videotapes for emotional tone. Results indicated a main effect for emotion expressed, with happiness and sadness more easily identified by judges than anger. Accuracy was also greater for happiness and sadness in the hypnotically induced condition. However, role-played anger was more easily identified than hypnotically induced anger. An interaction of channel (body/face) and emotion indicated that identification of sadness and anger was easier for judges when the body alone was shown. Findings are discussed in terms of display rules for the expression of emotion.We gratefully acknowledge Irving Kirsch, Ross Buck, and Paul Ekman for their helpful comments on a draft of this article. Special thanks to Reuben Baron, without whose support neither this article nor our careers in psychology would have been possible.A preliminary report of this study was presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association in Toronto, August 1984.     

Recognition of Facial Expressions of Negative Emotions in Romantic Relationships

Previous research has demonstrated that individuals who were accurate at recognizing facial expressions of emotions reported better relationships with family and friends. The purpose of the present study was to test whether the ability to recognize facial expressions of negative emotions predicted greater relationship satisfaction with their romantic relationships and whether this link was mediated by constructive responses to conflict. Participants currently involved in a romantic relationship completed a validated performance measure of recognition of facial expressions and afterwards reported on the responses they engaged in during conflict with their romantic partner and rated their romantic relationship satisfaction. Results showed that accurate recognition of facial expressions of negative emotions (anger, contempt, disgust, fear, and sadness) predicted less conflict engaging behaviors during conflict with their romantic partners (but not positive problem solving and withdrawal), which in turn predicted greater relationship satisfaction. The present study is the first to show that the ability to recognize facial expressions of negative emotions is related to romantic relationship satisfaction and that constructive responses to conflict such as less conflict engaging behaviors, mediate this process.     

Brief Report: Useful Information for Face Perception Is Described with FACS

When we perceive the emotions of other people, we extract much information from the face. The present experiment used FACS (Facial Action Coding System), which is an instrument that measures the magnitude of facial action from a neutral face to a changed, emotional face. Japanese undergraduates judged the emotion in pictures of 66 static Japanese male faces (11 static pictures for each of six basic expressions: happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust), ranging from neutral faces to maximally expressed emotions. The stimuli had previously been scored with FACS and were presented in random order. A high correlation between the subjects' judgments of facial expressions and the FACS scores was found.