Chapter 3 - Facial Activity and Emotion Expression

Summary

How do faces convey emotional information? Some psychologists believe that private emotions automatically surface as facial expressions. Others argue that the main purpose of facial activity is to communicate social motives and influence other people’s behaviour. This chapter evaluates these competing accounts using evidence from judgement and production studies. Judgement studies ask participants to decide what emotion is being expressed in photos or videos of facial expressions. Production studies assess facial activity in emotional situations more directly. Findings obtained using these two methods do not always converge but neither kind of study provides direct support for universal or consistent emotion-expression connections. A range of different factors seems to influence facial activity, only some of which relate to emotion. However, some forms of emotional influence clearly do depend on facial communication and calibration.