Contextual Effects on Surprise Expressions: A Developmental Study

Although research succeeds in eliciting spontaneous feelings of surprise with participants, these participants rarely show a prototypical expression of raising eyebrows, opening mouth, and widening eyes. In other words, there seems to be a discrepancy between the display and feeling of surprise. To get a better understanding of this discrepancy, we assessed what factors influence the display of surprise in children (study 1) and adults (study 2). In both studies, we conducted a quiz-like experiment, in which we manipulated the social context (participants either competed or collaborated), and various quiz questions to extract reactions of surprise (either caused by unexpectedly correct or unexpectedly incorrect answers). Results show that cause and social context did not affect the appearance of specific features in participants’ surprise display. However, we did find these factors to interact with regards to the intensity of perceived surprise displays of adults. For children, these relations were less complex. Overall, we can conclude that the expression of surprise is indeed moderated by contextual factors, namely cause of the surprise, social context, and age.