Detecting Genuine and Deliberate Displays of Surprise in Static and Dynamic Faces

Abstract

People are good at recognizing emotions from facial expressions, but less accurate at determining the authenticity of such expressions. We investigated whether this depends upon the technique that senders use to produce deliberate expressions, and on decoders seeing these in a dynamic or static format. Senders were filmed as they experienced genuine surprise in response to a jack-in-the-box (Genuine). Other senders faked surprise with no preparation (Improvised) or after having first experienced genuine surprise themselves (Rehearsed). Decoders rated the genuineness and intensity of these expressions, and the confidence of their judgment. It was found that both expression type and presentation format impacted decoder perception and accurate discrimination. Genuine surprise achieved the highest ratings of genuineness, intensity, and judgmental confidence (dynamic only), and was fairly accurately discriminated from deliberate surprise expressions. In line with our predictions, Rehearsed expressions were perceived as more genuine (in dynamic presentation), whereas Improvised were seen as more intense (in static presentation). However, both were poorly discriminated as not being genuine. In general, dynamic stimuli improved authenticity discrimination accuracy and perceptual differences between expressions. While decoders could perceive subtle differences between different expressions (especially from dynamic displays), they were not adept at detecting if these were genuine or deliberate. We argue that senders are capable of producing genuine-looking expressions of surprise, enough to fool others as to their veracity.

Emotion recognition and deception detection

“…If decoders are poor at separating emotional cue authenticity, then being emotionally perceptive may be useful for detecting genuine emotions but detrimental when attempting to detect feigned (deceptive) emotions. This is supported by findings showing senders can produce genuine-looking emotional expressions (Krumhuber & Manstead, 2009), and that decoders a poor at separating expression authenticity (Zloteanu et al, 2018).…”

“…reliable muscle activation). However, this is only valid if there are perceptual differences between genuine and deceptive expressions, which seems to not be the case (Krumhuber & Manstead, 2009), nor do decoders seem capable of discriminating emotion authenticity (Zloteanu et al, 2018). Liars may be able to produce deceptive emotional displays that are "good enough" to activate the genuine embodied simulation in decoders, misleading them to infer this reflects the sender's underlying affect.…”

“…Connecting back to the emotion recognition literature, research has shown that people make quick inferences regarding others based on their facial expressions, even briefly presented (Willis & Todorov, 2006), however, and more importantly, they are not accurate at determining if the emotions decoded are genuine or fabricated (Krumhuber, Likowski, & Weyers, 2014;Zloteanu, Krumhuber, & Richardson, 2018). Given that people prefer, focus on, and assign more weight to nonverbal information when making judgments about others, a picture starts to emerge where emotional cues are less a tool for detecting deception and more a source for potential bias and inaccuracy (Bond, Howard, Hutchison, & Masip, 2013).…”

A performance comparison of eight commercially available automatic classifiers for facial affect recognition

“…For example, it has been shown that spontaneous facial actions differ in their temporal and morphological characteristics (e.g., duration, intensity, asymmetry) from posed ones [65]. Furthermore, the overall patterns of activity are often heterogeneous, which renders them more difficult to discern because of their ambiguous emotional content [66][67][68]. Results based on instructed and stereotypical facial portrayals may therefore not be directly transferable to those derived from activity occurring in spontaneous situations.…”

Social context and culture influence judgments of non-Duchenne smiles

“…However, facial expressions can be ambiguous and nuanced. Some of them are shown in order to be polite, prevent conflicts, or strategically mask one's true intention to obtain resources that could otherwise be denied (Namba et al 2016;Zloteanu et al 2018). This is particularly true for smile expressions which occur frequently (Chapell 1997), are perceptually salient (Smith and Schyns 2009), and easy to produce on demand (Ekman and Friesen 1982;Ekman et al 1988).…”