The Role of Facial Feedback in the Modulation of Clinically-Relevant Ambiguity Resolution

Forming Facial Expressions Influences Assessment of Others' Dominance but Not Trustworthiness

“…This is called embodied cognition , indicating that cognitive processes might be shaped by both the brain and the body, including the motor system and the perceptual system. For example, variations in facial muscles (associated with facial expressions) lead to changes in emotions and impressions of objects (Strack et al, 1988 ; Soussignan, 2002 ; Wiswede et al, 2009 ; Davey et al, 2013 ). Through increasing in autonomic arousal and self-reported emotional experiences, in general, forming smiling faces makes expressers feel more positive, and forming frowning faces makes them feel more negative (Davis et al, 2009 ; Lee et al, 2013 ).…”

“…To address a perceiver's state, we used a facial feedback method that has been suggested as a valid manipulations (Strack et al, 1988 ; Soussignan, 2002 ; Wiswede et al, 2009 ; Davey et al, 2013 ; Meeten et al, 2015 ; Kaiser and Davey, 2017 ). In this method, participants are often asked to make a specific facial form using a pen (Wiswede et al, 2009 ): For example, participants are frequently asked to bite a pen with their teeth, which causes their lip-corners to raise.…”

“…Previous studies have showed that participants forming such faces report more positive experiences when presented with pleasant scenes and humorous cartoons (Strack et al, 1988 ; Soussignan, 2002 ). Additionally, participants who were asked to knit their brows, forming disgusted or scowling faces, were more likely to interpret homophones that had threatening and neutral meanings as threats (Davey et al, 2013 ). These results suggest that participants' physiological states of facial expression can influence their cognition.…”

The Effect of Facial Expressions on the Evaluation of Ambiguous Statements

“…Third, whereas Davey et al (2013) compared only one facial expression (frowning) with a neutral expression, the present study compares a negative facial expression (frowning) with a positive facial expression (smiling). Fourth, Davey et al (2013) used only a weak measure of whether participants were aware of facial expressions being related to emotional experience. The present study uses a structured debriefing interview that will determine whether facial expression manipulation affects the evaluation of ambiguity in the absence of knowledge about the purpose of the experiment, knowledge about facial expressions being manipulated, knowledge about the study being concerned with mood in any way, and knowledge about the relationship between facial expression manipulation and mood in the experiment.…”

“…For example, experienced negative moods (such as anxiety) generate a bias towards interpreting threat/neutral ambiguous material as threatening rather than neutral (Blanchette & Richards, 2010;Mathews & MacLeod, 2005), whether that ambiguity is contained in sentences with ambiguous meanings, homophones, or in lexical decision tasks with potentially ambiguous endings. Davey, Sired, Jones, Meeten, & Dash (2013) have recently investigated the effects of facial expressions on evaluation of ambiguous stimuli using both a homophone spelling task (Experiment 1) and a psychopathology-relevant availability heuristics task in which participants were required to generate potential outcomes associated with ambiguous bodily sensations (Experiment 2). These experiments asked participants to manipulate golf tees attached to their brow (on the corrugator supercilii muscles) in such a way as to create either a frowning expression or a neutral non-frowning expression (a procedure originally devised by Larsen, Kasimatis & Frey, 1992).…”