Acting Surprised: Comparing Perceptions of Different Dynamic Deliberate Expressions

Abstract

People are accurate at classifying emotions from facial expressions but much poorer at determining if such expressions are spontaneously felt or deliberately posed. We explored if the method used by senders to produce an expression influences the decoder’s ability to discriminate authenticity, drawing inspiration from two well-known acting techniques: the Stanislavski (internal) and Mimic method (external). We compared spontaneous surprise expressions in response to a jack-in-the-box (genuine condition), to posed displays of senders who either focused on their past affective state (internal condition) or the outward expression (external condition). Although decoders performed better than chance at discriminating the authenticity of all expressions, their accuracy was lower in classifying external surprise compared to internal surprise. Decoders also found it harder to discriminate external surprise from spontaneous surprise and were less confident in their decisions, perceiving these to be similarly intense but less genuine-looking. The findings suggest that senders are capable of voluntarily producing genuine-looking expressions of emotions with minimal effort, especially by mimicking a genuine expression. Implications for research on emotion recognition are discussed.

Sitting in Judgment: How Body Posture Influences Deception Detection and Gazing Behavior

“…Furthermore, recent propositions suggest that empathy relates more to the speed of processing facial expressions, and not how accurately expressions are classified [62]. Importantly, research finds that people are also poor at discriminating genuine from deliberate emotional displays, calling into question their diagnostic value as cues to deception [63,64]. It would be worthwhile to explore if recognition of more naturalistic or social-emotional displays would show an effect of posture.…”

More What Duchenne Smiles Do, Less What They Express

“…DSs and NDSs of this type are usually more difficult to discern compared with those produced naturally (Gunnery & Ruben, 2016), probably because they lack other cues relevant for judgments of authenticity (Krumhuber & Manstead, 2009). Such preselection of stimuli (a) imposes constraints as to which smile exemplars are regarded as representative of genuine positive affect and (b) reinforces socially shared beliefs borne out by perception studies (Zloteanu et al, 2021).…”

“…DS and NDS of this type are usually more difficult to discern compared to those produced naturally (Gunnery & Ruben, 2016), probably because they lack other cues relevant for judgments of authenticity (Krumhuber & Manstead, 2009). Such pre-selection of stimuli imposes constraints as to which smile exemplars are regarded as representative of genuine positive affect and reinforces socially shared beliefs borne out by perception studies (Zloteanu, Krumhuber, & Richardson, 2020). This tendency is exacerbated by categorization tasks that prompt viewers to separate stimuli into different classes and assign pre-defined labels (e.g., posed vs spontaneous, genuine vs fake).…”

Darwin's illegitimate children: How body language experts undermine Darwin's legacy

“…for surprise, Namba et al, 2017Namba et al, , 2021, this does not mean that humans are able to learn them from 'body language experts', and to detect them in face-to-face interactions (e.g. Zloteanu et al, 2018Zloteanu et al, , 2021b. This is rendered even more unlikely if people, following the advice of body language experts, are attempting to evaluate a baseline, consider clusters of behaviours and adapt the nature of their questions at the same time.…”