Differences in facial expressions of four universal emotions

Children's identification of graphic symbols representing four basic emotions: Comparison of Afrikaans-speaking and Sepedi-speaking children

“…According to Sullivan and Kirkpatrick (1996), children focus on the lower component of the face (the mouth) when interpreting happy facial expressions. Kohler,Turner, Stolar, Bilker, Brensinger, Gur, & Gur (2004) found that apart from an open mouth, raised eyebrows are facial features that are also evident in the expression of happy. Higher expression intensity is associated with more accurate matching, particularly for the expression of fear, disgust and happiness (Herba, Landua, Russell, Ecker, &Phillips, 2006).…”

“…The facial features indicating the emotion anger are furrowed or lowered eyebrows drawn together, wide open eyes with a tightened lower lid, a nose wrinkle, raised upper and turned lower lips exposing teeth, as well as stretched lip corners and a dropped jaw or pressed lips (Ekman &Friesen, 1975;Kohler et al, 2004;Sullivan &Kirkpatrick, 1996). Sullivan and Kirkpatrick (1996) found that children focused on the upper component when interpreting angry facial expressions.…”

“…Facial features that were indicative of afraid expressions were furrowed and raised eyebrows, eyebrows drawn together, wide open eyes, raised upper eyelids, tense lower eyelids, stretched lips/mouth and a dropped jaw (Ekman &Friesen, 1975;Kohler et al, 2004;Sullivan &Kirkpatrick, 1996). Target symbol 11 was the Afrikaans-speaking participants" first and the Sepedi-speaking participants" fourth most preferred choice to represent afraid.…”

Virtual faces as a tool to study emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia

“…Now that we know that schizophrenia patients show similar deficits in the recognition of virtual and natural faces we can use the advantages of virtual faces such as the ease of control, animation and change of parameters to develop further diagnostic and therapeutic interventions. The fact that patients show deficits in the recognition of virtual emotions further indicates that they are already impaired in the recognition of basic emotional features because virtual expressions only contain major and frequent features; natural faces, in contrast, also contain infrequent and minor features that vary inter-individually (Kohler et al, 2004). This variability could make them more difficult to recognize.…”

“…Concerning the emotion specificity of schizophrenia patients' recognition deficits in natural faces there is a great heterogeneity of findings. However, most of the studies have found the impairment to be largest for particular negative emotions like fear, sadness or disgust (Kohler et al, 2004;Edwards et al, 2001;Behere et al, 2009). Accordingly, we expected similar differential deficits for virtual emotion recognition.…”