PSYC18H3 Chapter 4: Chapter 4
Chapter 4 – Communication of emotions
Phases of Flirting:
1. Initial attention getting phase
2. Recognition phase – gazes with interest
3. Exploration phase – touches and non-accidental bumps
4. Keeping-time phase – mirror each other’s actions to assess interest = ROMANTIC encounter
Five Kinds of Nonverbal Behavior
- Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen (1969) organized nonverbal behavior into five categories.
o First are emblems: nonverbal gestures that directly translate to words.
o Second are the illustrators: nonverbal gestures that accompany our speech, to make it
vivid, visual or emphatic
o Regulators: nonverbal behaviours that we use to coordinate conversation, head nods,
eyebrow flashes and encouraging vocalizations of speech
o Self-adaptor: nervous behaviours that lack seeming intentions, as if simply to release
nervous energy
o Displays of emotion: signals in the face, voice, body and touch that convey emotion
Facial Expressions of Emotion
Markers of Emotional Expressions
- First, expressions of emotion tend to last just a few seconds
- Second, facial expressions of emotion involve involuntary muscle actions that people cannot
deliberately produce and cannot suppress
- These involuntary actions that accompany emotional expressions have a different
neuroanatomical basis than voluntary facial actions such as the furrowed brow or lip press
- Third, as Darwin speculated, human emotional expressions often have parallels in displays of
other species, a thesis that has guided numerous studies of embarrassment, laughter, love, and
the human voice
Studies of the Universality of Facial Expressions
- Darwin derived three principles to explain emotional expressions
o First, according to the principle of serviceable habits, expressive behaviors that helped
individuals respond adaptively to threats and opportunities in the evolutionary past will
reoccur in the future.
o Second, the principle of antithesis holds that opposing states will be associated with
opposing expressions.
▪ For example, you will learn later that pride is signaled in dominant, size-
expanding displays—chest expansion and tilting the head back— whereas
shame is signaled in submissive behavior—drooping shoulders and downward
movements of the head.
o Third, the principle of nervous discharge states that excess, undirected energy is
released in random expressions, such as face touches, leg jiggles, and the like.
- Tomkins, Ekman, and Izard read Darwin’s book, and made his observations into two hypotheses
o the encoding hypothesis: the experience of different emotions should be associated
with the same distinct expressions in every culture.
o the decoding hypothesis: people of different cultures should interpret these
expressions in the same ways.
- Developed six emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise— according to
Darwin’s descriptions of the muscle configurations.
- Ekman, Sorenson, and Friesen (1969) then presented photos of the most easily identified
examples of each emotion to participants in Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and the United
States, and Papa New Genia, who selected from six emotion terms the one that best matched
the feeling the person was showing in each photo.
o Participants achieved accuracy rates between 80 and 90% for the six across cultures
- In another task, the researchers videotaped Fore participants as they displayed facial
expressions they would show in response to the emotion-specific story, and then presented
unedited clips of these expressions to college students in the United States, who selected from
six emotion terms the one that best matched the Fore’s pose in each clip
- The results from these two studies largely confirmed Darwin’s thesis about the universality of
emotional expression
- This was even true of children, suggesting that the ability to judge emotions from facial
expression occurs early in development
Critiques of the Studies of Universal Facial Expressions
- Free response critique.
o In Ekman and Friesen’s study and most of those that followed it, participants were
required to label the expressions using terms the researchers provided.
o To address this critique, Haidt and Keltner (1999) asked participants in the United States
and India to label photos of 14 different expressions, including the Ekman and Friesen
expressions, in their own words; the freely produced labels revealed that participants
from these strikingly different cultures used similar concepts in labeling facial
expressions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and embarrassment
o Haidt + Keltner concluded that among the 14 expressions they studied, “there is no neat
distinction between cross-culturally recognisable and non-recognisable expressions.
- Ecological validity: the expressions in Ekman’s studies may not be those that people routinely
produce or judge in their daily lives; they are highly stylized and exaggerated, often made by
actors or others who are adept at moving their facial muscles.
o BUT, have shown that people are better at recognizing emotional expressions from
dynamic displays, such as video clips, which come closer to real-life conditions.
o Study: Expressions of the blind children were not the full, basic prototypical expressions
predicted by Ekman’s kind of theory → extending this kind of argument that the very
same facial display can have different meanings dependent on the context.
Discovering New Facial Displays of Emotions
- Evidence of the kind that Ekman collected suggested that anger, disgust, happiness, and sadness
are associated with universal facial expressions
- Contempt has been added to the list; It is expressed by an asymmetrical tightening of the lip
corners or sneer, and conveys a moral disapproval of another
- To document other expressions, one needs to show that the experience of a specific emotion
correlates with a unique pattern of facial actions (encoding evidence) and that observers in
different cultures perceive that display as a sign of the target emotion (decoding evidence)
Self-Conscious Emotions: Embarrassment, Shame, and Pride
- Two recent investigations, working within the Darwinian tradition, have established that
embarrassment, shame, and pride have distinct nonverbal displays.
- E.g. of a study: Participants followed muscle-by-muscle instructions, given by a rather stern
experimenter, to achieve a difficult and odd-looking facial expression, while being videotaped.
o They then were asked to hold the expression for 10 seconds, and then were told to rest.
o Performing this task resembles the effect of a common elicitor of embarrassment—loss
of poise and composure in front of others
o For those participants who spontaneously reported experiencing embarrassment,
Keltner coded the 10 seconds of behavior that occurred immediately after the
participant was asked to rest.
o The embarrassed individual’s eyes went down, within .75 seconds.
o Then the individual turned his head to the side, typically leftward, and downwithin the
next .5 second.
o As this headmovement occurred, the individual smiled for about two seconds.
o At the onset and offset of this smile were other facial actions, such as lip sucks, lip
presses, lip puckers.
o And while the person’s head was down there were a few curious actions: the person
looked up three times with furtive glances, and often touched their face.
- Embarrassment: It had the fluid, gradual onset and offset times of an involuntary emotional
expression.
- In one study, participants were presented with 2-to-3-sec-long video-clips of the embarrassment
displays along with spontaneous displays of disgust, anger, shame, amusement, and fear
o Using a forced-choice method, they reliably judged the displays as communicating
embarrassment.
- A study turned to the issue of universality and whether participants can judge embarrassment
from its static cues—the downward gaze and head-movement, the controlled smile
o People from a small, Hindu temple town in India were presented with static photos of
the embarrassment display and those of other emotions, and in their own words reliably
interpreted the expression as embarrassment, and readily differentiated the display
from that of shame, which is signaled in downward head movements and gaze aversion
- In appeasement interactions between other species, one individual, typically a subordinate,
relies on certain signals to pacify and reduce the aggressive tendencies of another individual,
often a dominant individual in the social hierarchy
o Human embarrassment displays resemble the appeasement displays of other species.
- Significance of the elements of the embarrassment display; First, there is gaze aversion.
o This is a classic behavior by which many species appease others.
o Many primates turn their heads away to interrupt escalating aggression.
Document Summary
Initial attention getting phase: recognition phase gazes with interest, exploration phase touches and non-accidental bumps, keeping-time phase (cid:373)irror ea(cid:272)h other"s a(cid:272)tio(cid:374)s to assess i(cid:374)terest = romantic encounter. First, expressions of emotion tend to last just a few seconds. Second, facial expressions of emotion involve involuntary muscle actions that people cannot deliberately produce and cannot suppress. These involuntary actions that accompany emotional expressions have a different neuroanatomical basis than voluntary facial actions such as the furrowed brow or lip press. Third, as darwin speculated, human emotional expressions often have parallels in displays of other species, a thesis that has guided numerous studies of embarrassment, laughter, love, and the human voice. Developed six emotions anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise according to. Ekman, sorenson, and friesen (1969) then presented photos of the most easily identified examples of each emotion to participants in japan, brazil, argentina, chile, and the united.
