Emotion: Expressing and Experiencing Emotion

Learning Targets

  • Explain our ability to communicate nonverbally.
  • Explain how men and women differ in nonverbal communication.
  • Explain how gestures and facial expressions are understood within and across cultures.
  • Explain how our facial expressions influence our feelings.

Detecting Emotion in Others

  • Nonverbal Communication:
    • Firm handshake: Conveys outgoing, expressive personality.
    • Gaze: Communicates intimacy.
    • Darting eyes: Signals anxiety.
    • Passionate love: Extended gazing.
  • Experiment:
    • Unacquainted heterosexual pairs gazed at hands or eyes for 2 minutes.
    • Eye gazers reported attraction and affection (Kellerman et al., 1989).
  • Brain's role:
    • Detects subtle expressions; adept at reading nonverbal cues.
    • Detects hints of smiles (Maher et al., 2014).
    • Quickly assesses attraction in speed-dating interactions (Place et al., 2009).
    • Identifies status (Tracy et al., 2013).
    • Judges attractiveness, trustworthiness, and competence rapidly (Willis & Todorov, 2006).
  • Threat Detection:
    • Readily senses subliminally presented negative words (Gomes et al., 2018).
    • Quickly identifies angry faces (Öhman et al., 2001; Stjepanovic & Labar, 2018).
    • Even 2-year-olds attend to angry faces (Burris et al., 2019).
    • Experience sensitizes individuals to specific emotions.
    • Physically abused children are more likely to perceive anger in morphed faces (Pollak & Kistler, 2002; Pollak & Tolley-Schell, 2003).
  • Concealing Emotions:
    • Hard-to-control facial muscles reveal concealed emotions.
    • Inner eyebrow raise signals distress or worry.
    • Raised eyebrows pulled together signal fear.
    • Raised cheeks and activated muscles under the eyes suggest a natural smile.
    • Feigned smiles are held longer and switched off suddenly, while genuine smiles are briefer and fade less abruptly (Bugental, 1986).
    • During the pandemic, masks may have relieved pressure on women to feign smiles (Bennett, 2020).
    • True smiles are perceived as trustworthy, authentic, and attractive (Gunnery & Ruben, 2016).
  • Detecting Deceit:
    • Difficult to discern deceit, behavioral differences between liars and truth tellers are minute (Hartwig & Bond, 2011).
    • Accuracy rate is just 54 percent, barely better than a coin toss (Bond & DePaulo, 2006).
  • Sensitivity to Emotions:
    • Varies among individuals.
    • Shown brief film clips, people were asked to name the emotion displayed (Rosenthal et al., 1979).
    • Introverts tend to excel at reading others' emotions; extraverts are generally easier to read (Ambady et al., 1995).
  • Nonverbal cues:
    • Gestures, facial expressions, and vocal tones convey important information.
    • Participants who heard recordings of marital separations were better able to predict the people's current and future adjustment (Mason et al., 2010).
  • Online Communication:
    • Lacks vocal and facial nuances.
    • Risk of egocentrism (Kruger et al., 2005).
    • Emojis help convey emotions.

Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior

  • Gender differences:
    • Women outperform men at emotion detection (Hall, 2016).
    • Advantage emerges early in infancy (McClure, 2000).
    • Women demonstrate greater emotional literacy.
    • Describe more complex emotional reactions (Barrett et al., 2000).
  • Emotional Responsiveness:
    • Women show greater emotional responsiveness and expressiveness, especially for positive emotions (Fischer & LaFrance, 2015; McDuff et al., 2017).
    • More open to feelings (Costa et al., 2001).
    • Strong perception that emotionality is "more true of women" (Chaplin & Aldao, 2013; Newport, 2001).
  • Anger Perception:
    • Anger is perceived as a more masculine emotion (Becker et al., 2007).
  • Attribution of Emotionality:
    • Women's emotionality attributed to disposition, men's to circumstances (Barrett & Bliss-Moreau, 2009).
  • Empathy:
    • Women are far more likely than men to describe themselves as empathic (Benenson et al., 2021).
    • Identify with others and imagine being in their skin (Wondra & Ellsworth, 2015).
    • Fiction readers report higher empathy levels (Mar et al., 2009).
    • Women display more emotion when observing others' emotions.
    • Experience upsetting events more deeply with more brain activation (Canli et al., 2002).
  • Nature vs. Nurture:
    • Female-male empathy differences occur in nonhuman animals (Christov-Moore et al., 2014).
    • Cultural learning also matters.
    • People in positions of high power and privilege are less motivated to empathize (Dietze & Knowles, 2021; Kraus et al., 2012).
    • Those lower in power often feel the urge to understand others' emotions (Dietze & Knowles, 2016).

Culture and Emotion

  • Gestures:
    • Meaning varies from culture to culture.
  • Facial Expressions:
    • Universally, the smiling face is labeled as "happiness."
    • Differ on other expressions, especially anger and fear (Crivelli et al., 2016a).
    • Better at judging faces from own culture (Crivelli et al., 2016b; Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002; Laukka et al., 2016).
  • Universals:
    • Some emotion categories are clear universals.
    • People everywhere can discriminate real from fake laughs (Bryant et al., 2018).
    • Blind from birth exhibit common facial expressions (Galati et al., 1997; Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008).
  • Shared Cultural Experiences:
    • Do not fully explain shared emotional categories.
    • Isolated people in New Guinea easily read by North Americans (Ekman & Friesen, 1971).
  • Evolutionary Perspective:
    • Charles Darwin argued that facial expressions communicated threats, greetings, and submission (Hess & Thibault, 2009).
    • Shared expressions helped ancestors survive.
    • Human sneer retains elements of an animal baring its teeth in a snarl.
    • Surprise raises eyebrows and widens eyes; disgust wrinkles the nose.
  • Control of Facial Expressions:
    • Routinely control faces to fit in, influence, or deceive others.
    • Euphoric Olympic gold-medal winners don't smile when alone but do when interacting with officials.
  • Cultural Events:
    • Emotional expressions are cultural events with different triggers and display rules.
    • Westerners biased toward enthusiastic positivity (Talhelm et al., 2019).
    • European Americans use excited smiles more frequently (Bencharit et al., 2019).
    • Cultures that encourage individuality prefer high-intensity emotions (Tsai, 2007).
    • Those that encourage adjusting to others value less intense emotional displays (Cordaro et al., 2018; Matsumoto et al., 2009).
    • In Japan, the mouth conveys less emotion than the eyes (Masuda et al., 2008; Yuki et al., 2007).
  • Cultural Differences Within Nations:
    • Irish more expressive than Scandinavians (Tsai & Chentsova-Dutton, 2003).
    • Differ by gender, age, and status.
    • Facial expressions are biological, cognitive, and socio-cultural phenomena.

The Effects of Facial Expressions

  • William James's Belief:
    • We can control emotions by going "through the outward movements" (James, 1890).
  • Charles Darwin's Contention:
    • "The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it" (Darwin, 1872).
  • Facial Feedback Effect:
    • Expressions amplify and regulate emotion.
    • Subtly induced frowning expressions lead to feeling a little angry (Laird, 1974, 1984; Laird & Lacasse, 2014).
    • Constructing a fearful expression leads to feeling more fear (Duclos et al., 1989).
    • Has been found many times, in many places, for many basic emotions (Coles et al., 2019).
    • We're happier when smiling, angrier when scowling, and sadder when frowning.
    • Activating smiling muscles makes stressful situations less upsetting (Kraft & Pressman, 2012).
    • Enhances positive feelings when reacting to something pleasant or funny (Soussignan, 2001).
    • Advice to "put on a happy face" has practical wisdom.
  • Face's Role:
    • More than a billboard that displays feelings; it also feeds feelings.
    • Some depressed patients felt better after Botox injections paralyzed their frowning muscles (Parsaik et al., 2016).
    • Botox paralysis slows reading of sadness- or anger-related sentences and activity in emotion-related brain circuits (Havas et al., 2010; Hennenlotter et al., 2008).
    • The opposite happens when Botox paralyzes laughter muscles (Lewis, 2018).
  • Behavior Feedback Effect:
    • Walking with short, shuffling steps versus long strides shifts mood (Carney et al., 2015; Flack, 2006).
    • Leaning back lessens anger (Krahé et al., 2018).
    • Going through the motions awakens the emotions.
  • Empathy and Mimicry:
    • Mimicking another person's expression helps us feel what another feels (Vaughn & Lanzetta, 1981).
    • Losing ability to mimic others can leave us struggling to make emotional connections.
    • Natural mimicry of others' emotions helps explain why emotions are contagious (Dimberg et al., 2000; Neumann & Strack, 2000; Peters & Kashima, 2015).
    • Positive social media posts create a ripple effect (Kramer, 2012).

Review

  • 4.8-6: Nonverbal Communication
    • Body movements, facial expressions, and vocal tones.
    • Brief filmed slices of behavior can reveal feelings.
  • 4.8-7: Gender Differences
    • Women read emotional cues more easily and are more empathic.
    • Show greater emotional responsiveness, especially for positive emotions.
  • 4.8-8: Culture and Emotion
    • Meaning of gestures varies with culture.
    • Some facial expressions are universal.
    • Context and culture influence interpretation.
    • Cultural display rules influence the amount of emotion expressed.
    • Elicitors of emotion may differ between or within cultures.
  • 4.8-9: Influence of Facial Expressions
    • Facial expressions can trigger emotional feelings and signal the body to respond.
    • Mimicking helps us empathize.
    • Behavior feedback effect: behavior influences thoughts, feelings, and actions.