Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that a person’s emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications; and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision. In this article, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the common view, and we then examine the scientific evidence that tests this view, focusing on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. But our review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life. This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require.

Context may reveal how you feel

“…That is, there are six facial configurations that, when observed in isolation, are most of the time interpreted to communicate these emotion categories (6). Indeed, many studies have been completed that confirm this view, although more recent studies have identified a much larger set of expressions, including compound emotions such as happily disgusted as well as other affective signals (2,7). But context remains essential to correctly interpret facial expressions, as demonstrated in the examples in Figs.…”

“…1, most people identify a female expressing sadness on the left and an angry male on the right. But while identity and other attributes are recognized quite accurately (1), affect is not (2). To see this, look at the images in Fig.…”

The Pacified Face: Early Embodiment Processes and the Use of Dummies

“…Moreover, Gale and Martyn (1996) suggest that pacifiers could influence not only babies' emotional skills but their general intelligence. By 3 years of age children begin to show reliability in facial expressions, associate them with specific meanings and contexts (Feldman Barrett et al, 2019;Ruba et al, 2019), and be aware of display rules (Cole, 1986). Even beyond these early developmental periods, people's emotion concepts are affected by the input from their environment (Levari et al, 2018).…”

How Do Induced Affective States Bias Emotional Contagion to Faces? A Three-Dimensional Model

“…Similarly, in a conceptually analogous manipulation of transitive affect, Dezecache et al (2013) found that explicit identifications of positive faces were not above chance, while ZM activity increased for positive faces (Dezecache et al, 2013). Furthermore, results from two experiments conducted by Fridlund (1991) support the claim that implicit facial expressions may be erratically associated with explicit subjective reports of emotional experiencefor a detailed review, see Barrett et al (2019). We believe these results are puzzling because subjective measures either collected in a single bipolar scale (Deng and Hu, 2018) or as discrete identifications (Dezecache et al, 2013) do not provide enough information to determine the amount of subjective contagion experienced by participants.…”