Psychology 2070A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Paul Ekman, Nonverbal Communication
20 Nov 2016
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Chapter 4 – Social Perception
• Social Perception: The study of how we form impressions of other people and make inferences about
them.
A. Nonverbal Behavior (One important source of information for social perception)
• Nonverbal Communication: The way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally,
w/o words; nonverbal cues include facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position and
movement, the use of touch, and eye gaze.
o Help people express their emotions, attitudes, and personality
o Substitute verbal message.
• Human is not only species that could understand nonverbal communication, and we could even
understand other species’ nonverbal communication
o Experiment #1 - @ Université du Québec à Montréal
▪ Showing different pictures of cats expressing different emotions, people were remarkably
accurate at identifying the cats’ emotions
o Experiment #2
▪ Dogs are adept at reading no only dog nonverbal but human nonverbal as well.
▪ Perform even better than chimpanzees.
• We tend to mimic the nonverbal behavior of others
o The extent to mimicry differs, depending on our gender and the gender of the person with whom
we are interacting.
o Experiment #1 - @ Université du Québec à Montréal
▪ By using facial electromyography, it shows that we automatically mimic other’s smiles, esp.
when we are interacting with someone we like, considering him or her as our group member,
and the mimic person is a gender of female.
▪ Our tendency to mimic other people’s facial expressions may reflect empathy – The capacity
to feel what someone else is feeling.
▪ Mirror Neurons: Neurons that respond when we perform an action and when we see
someone else perform the same action. (Automatic and Involuntary)
o Bruno Wicker and his colleagues @ 2003 found that feeling disgusted oneself and observing
someone else’s facial expression of disgust activated the same region of participant’s brain
▪ By using the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
a. Facial Expressions of Emotion (Crown Jewel of nonverbal communication)
• The primary emotions conveyed by the face are universal – All human beings everywhere encode
emotions in the same way, and all human beings can decode them with equal accuracy. Darwin’s
o Encode: To express or emit nonverbal behavior, such as smiling or patting someone on the back
o Decode: To interpret the meaning of the nonverbal behavior other people express, such as
deciding that a pat on the back was an expression of condescension and not kindness.
o Experiment #1 – Paul Ekman and Walter Friesen @ 1971
▪ Travelled to New Guinea where they had little contact w/ Western civilization, the Fore
people are still capable to match at least 6 major emotions with the pictures of Americans,
vice versa.
• Gender Effect: People were faster and more accurate at decding angry expressions on male faces and
at detecting happy expressions on female faces → Evolutionary Rationale
o The costs and benefits of perceiving anger and happiness would vary depending on whether the
encoder was male or female.
o By D. Vaughn Becker and colleagues @ 2007
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i. Are Facial Expressions of Emotion Universal?
• Concerns with Facial Expressions: - Level of Accuracy
o Experiment #1 – Paul Ekman and Walter Friesen @ 1975
▪ Showing the 6 major emotions across 6 countries.
(Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Japan, New Guinea, US)
▪ 82% in each culture labeled their happiness facial expressions successfully
▪ 54% in A & N labeled their fear facial expressions successfully
▪ < 44% in N labeled their disgusted facial expressions successfully
o Experiment #2 – Russell, Suzuki, and Ishida @ 1993
▪ Conducted at Canada, Greece, Japan
▪ Less agreement when participants are asked to name the emotion shown, rather than
select emotion terms from a list to match with the pictures.
▪ The facial expression of happiness was identified by the majority of respondents in each
country
▪ Only 14% Japanese participants generated fear-related words for fear expression.
▪ Contempt photograph was not labeled as such by participants in any cultures.
• Social Emotions (Contempt, anger) have cultural differences.
• What affect the Level of Accuracy?
o Depends on what other faces were presented
▪ Experiment – James Russell and Beverly Fehr @ 1987 @ UBC
• People who encountered a happy face first will be more likely to perceived the
neutral face as sad. Vice versa.
o Which part of the face people fixate on in trying to decode the emotion being expressed.
o The situation a person is in
o Difference in Thinking style (Analytic cs. Holistic)
▪ Experiment – Takahiko Masuda and colleagues @ 2008 @ U of Alberta
• Provide a picture with a central character with a facial expression of happy, sad,
angry, or neutral. His surrounding characters will either have the same or different
facial expression. Let Japanese and American participants interpret the expression
of the central character
• Findings:
o People from Japan are more likely being affected by the surrounding characters
due to holistic thinking style, and they tend to spend more time than American
looking at the characters in the background.
▪ Experiment #2 – Both Canadians and Japanese could respond faster at identifying facial
expressions when the expression and background matched, triggering the same
emotion.
ii. Why is Decoding Sometimes Inaccurate?
• Affect Blends: A facial expression in which one part of the face registers one emotion while
another part of the face registers a different emotion.
• People try to appear less emotional than they are so that no one knows how they really feel.
• Decoding facial expressions could be difficult due to cultural differences.
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b. Culture and Nonverbal communication
• Emotional Expressions – Display Rules
o Display Rules: Culturally determined rules about which emotional expressions are appropriate to
show.
o )n some cultures, it is considered more appropriate for men to display powerful emotions
anger, contempt, disgust then powerless emotions Fear, sadness
o The more individualistic a culture, the more likely it is that the expression of emotion is
encouraged.
o In Japan, women are more likely to hide their wide smiles behind their hands. People tend to
cover up more negative facial expressions w/ smiles and laughter. → Disrupt group harmony
• Personal Space
• Gestures
o Emblems: Nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture; they
usually have direct verbal translations, such as the okay sign.
o People would have different ways to sign numerals according to culture.
▪ Germans → Use the thumb to indicate the 1st numeral
▪ English and French Canadians → Start with index fingers.
B. Implicit Personality Theories: Filling in the Blanks
• Implicit Personality Theory: A type of schema people use to group various kinds of personality traits
together; for example, many people believe that if someone is kind, he or she is generous as well.
o A type of schema
o Problem: Astray, incorrect understanding
▪ Experiment #1 – Conducted at UBC
• People tend to rate people who are shy as unintelligent → Wrong!
▪ Experiment #2 – Conducted in the states and Canada
• Univiersity students use implicit personality theory to determine whether they should
use condoms in sexual situaitons.
• People who like their sexual partner, he or she did not dress provocatively, he or she is
not from a large city would less likely to think that a condom is necessary.
a. Culture and Implicit Personality Theories (Strongly tied)
• Experiment #1 – Dion, Pak, and Dion @ 1990 @ University of Toronto and Ontario Science Centre
o In Individualist culture, physical attractiveness → Personal traits → Success in life
▪ In Ontario Science Centre, they shows photographs of attractive and unattractive individuals,
more positive qualities were attributed to the attractive individuals, predicting that
individuals would experience more success in life
o In collectivist culture, Group-related attributes → Success in life
▪ Observing leaders in U of T’s Chinese community, people are more likely to be success in life
if they have more group-related attributes. (Less likely to assume they have good personality)
• Experiment #2 – Hoffman, Lau, and Johnson @ 1986
o In Western culture, there is an artistic personality - creative, intense, temperamental,
unconventional lifestyle
o In Chinese culture, there is a shi gú personality – worldly, devoted to family, socially skillful,
somewhat reserved.
o Provide a story to either bilingual or unilingual English speakers to test whether they used their
implicit personality theories to fill in the blanks
o Findings:
▪ People do affect by their culture, which is the same for language!
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find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Social perception: the study of how we form impressions of other people and make inferences about. Holistic: provide a picture with a central character with a facial expression of happy, sad, angry, or neutral. His surrounding characters will either have the same or different facial expression. People tend to cover up more negative facial expressions w/ smiles and laughter. Internal attribution: the inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about him or her, such as his or her attitude, character, or personality: e. g. He yells at her because she steps into the street w/o looking. Satisfied spouse: the covariation model: internal vs. Do other people at work also yell at hannah, or only the boss: distinctiveness information: information about the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli, e. g.
