Communication of affect through facial expressions in humans.

Abstract

The communication of affect through spontaneous facial expressions was studied with 10 pairs of female undergraduates and 9 pairs of males. "Sender" subjects watched 25 slides designed to elicit affect while "observers" watched the sender's face over television and made judgments about the nature and intensity of the affect. Skin conductance and heart rate were recorded from both sender and observer. Results revealed significant communication of affect, particularly among the female pairs. Relationships between the communication process, personality measures, and physiological responding were explored, and a negative relationship was found between the sender's skin conductance responding and communication accuracy.

Sex differences in emotion: Expression, experience, and physiology.

“…Buck and colleagues (Buck et al, 1974;Buck et al, 1972) presented data showing that women tended to be more accurate in their communication accuracy (i.e., facial expression) but less electrodermally reactive (externalizers); whereas, men tended to be less accurate in communication accuracy and more electrodermally reactive (internalizers). To investigate this distinction in the present study, the mean of expressive behavior and the mean of skin conductance reactivity across all films were computed.…”

“…One hypothesis (Buck et al, 1974;Buck et al, 1972) holds that women tend to be externalizers in that their display of emotion tends to be primarily in the expressive domain. By contrast, men tend to be internalizers in that their display of emotion is manifested primarily via the psychophysiological domain.…”

“…Buck and colleagues (Buck et al, 1974;Buck et al, 1972) found that women, who were more expressive, tended to be less psychophysiologically responsive (labeled externalizers) and men, who were less expressive, tended to be more psychophysiologically responsive (labeled internalizers). Other studies, however, have found sex differences in the relationship between physiological measures and other emotion domains.…”

“…That is, a number of studies have found women to be more expressive than men using a variety of expression measures, such as EMG (e.g., Greenwald, Cook, & Lang, 1989;Lang, Greenwald, Bradley, & Hamm, 1993;Schwartz, Brown, & Ahem, 1980), ratings of communication accuracy (e.g., Buck, Baron, Goodman, & Shapiro, 1980;Buck, Miller, & Caul, 1974;Buck, Savin, Miller, & Caul, 1972;Fujita, Harper, & Wiens, 1980;Rotter & Rotter, 1988;Wagner, Buck, & Winterbotham, 1993;Wagner, MacDonald, & Manstead, 1986;Zuckerman, Lipets, Hall Koivumaki, & Rosenthal, 1975), self-report of expression (e.g., Allen & Haccoun, 1976;Balswick & Avertt, 1977;Gross & John, 1995;Kring et al, 1994), and ratings of a variety of nonverbal behaviors such as smiling and gesturing (e.g., Barr & Kleck, 1995;Frances, 1979;Halberstadt, Hayes, & Pike, 1988;Notarious & Johnson, 1982;Ragan, 1982;Riggio & Friedman, 1986). Although fairly rare, some studies have failed to find sex differences in expressiveness (e.g., Cupchik & Poulos, 1984;Fridlund, 1990;Lanzetta, Cartwright-Smith, & Kleck, 1976;Vrana, 1993;Wagner, 1990;Zuckerman, Hall, DeFrank, & Rosenthal, 1976).…”

Individual Difference Variables, Affective Differentiation, and the Structures of Affect

“…e.g., Diener, Sandvik, & Larsen, 1985;Hagemann et al, 1999) and the capacity to detect and express emotions. For example, women discriminate facial expression more accurately, and they are also more expressive (Buck, Savin, Miller, & Caul, 1972;Cozby, 1973;Schwartz, Brown, & Ahern, 1980; Terracciano et al, 2002). Thayer and Johnsen (2000) reported that in judgments of facially expressed emotions, female responses showed a more complex structure based on valence and arousal dimensions, whereas male responses produced only a valence dimension.…”