Relative contributions of expressive behavior and contextual information to the judgment of the emotional state of another.

Abstract

This study used a technique for assessing the relative impact of facial-gestural expressions, as opposed to contextual information regarding the elicitor and situation, on the judgment of emotion. In Study 1, 28 undergraduates rated videotapes of spontaneous facial-gestural expressions and separately rated the emotionally loaded color slides that elicited those expressions. The source clarities of the expressions and slides were matched using correlation and distance measures, and 18 expressions and 9 slides were selected. In Study 2, 72 undergraduate receivers were shown systematic pairings of these expressions and slides and rated the emotional state of the expresser, who was supposedly watching that slide under public or private situational conditions. Expressions were found to be more important sources for all emotion judgments. For female receivers slides were relatively more important in the public than in the private situation.

(Implicitly) Judging a Book by Its Cover

“…Yet, researchers have long argued that studies of emotion expressions must examine the role of such contextual factors on judgments of these expressions (e.g., Carroll & Russell, 1996). Although several studies have found that when contextual cues are paired with expressions, the former tend to be ignored in lieu of the latter (e.g., Nakamura, Buck, & Kenny, 1990), others have shown that judgments of a target's emotion are largely influenced by contextual cues, and that in certain cases context can more powerfully determine a perceiver's judgment about the emotion conveyed than the expression itself (e.g., Aviezer et al, 2008;Carroll & Russell, 1996).…”

Holistic person processing: Faces with bodies tell the whole story.

“…This methodological choice may have been guided by the notion that basic facial expressions are viewed as universal (Ekman, 1993) and categorically discrete signals of emotion (Etcoff & Magee, 1992;Young et al, 1997) assumed to be directly mapped to specific emotional categories (Buck, 1994;Ekman, 1992). In its extreme formulation, it has been posited that the recognition of basic prototypical facial expressions is relatively immune to context influence (Buck, 1994;Ekman & O'Sullivan, 1988;Nakamura, Buck, & Kenny, 1990), and that when a face and body (or other context) are of equal clarity, the recognition of the former will dominate the latter (Ekman et al, 1982).…”

The Expression, Communication, and Regulation of Biological Emotions: Sex and Cultural Differences and Similarities

“…Nakamura (1988Nakamura ( , 2003 and Nakamura et al (1990) found that situational information affected the judgment of emotion for female participants in both America and Japan and for male participant in Japan: that is, the relative importance of expressions was greater in the private than in the public situation. American males were not influenced by the situational information.…”

“…Ekman et al (1982) noted that such research must control for the source clarity of the expression versus the context: that is, the ambiguity, message complexity, and strength of the information contained in facial expression versus context. In designs using differing techniques to control for this information-value, the facial/gestural expressions taken in the SVT were found to be consistently more important than context (slides) in accounting for variance in emotion judgments in both American and Japanese samples on all emotions measured (Nakamura, 1988(Nakamura, , 2003Nakamura, Buck, & Kenny, 1990, 2005.…”