Maybe Facial Expressions Are Not So Universal?
Oct/06/2011 09:59 Filed in: Emotion
If you only saw the close-up on the left, what do you think Serena Williams was feeling? Anger? Pain? Probably not pride, but that's what it was, as a quick glance to the zoomed-out image on the right reveals. This fact is a bit troubling for a long-held view that the face has approximately six unambiguous emotional expressions.
For decades, based on the pioneering work of Paul Ekman and colleagues, there has been an assumption that faces can unambiguously signal emotional states. It was assumed that there were six or so basic emotions that corresponded in a one-to-one fashion to distinct configurations of facial muscles (e.g., anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, fear, surprise). Accordingly, our minds would instantly know what someone was feeling simply by perceiving their face -- and their face alone.
New work by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Batja Mesquita, and their colleagues suggests that this long held view might just be wrong. Simply put -- context matters. If all you had to go on was Serena's face, accuracy at identifying her expression as pride would be very low and error identifying it as anger or pain would be fairly high. It is only through having an additional context of other cues that ambiguity in her emotional state can be resolved. Of course, it may certainly be the case that a smiling face is often happy, but it need not always be. Smiles, for example, often occur when a person is embarrassed.
Detection of actual emotions, much like most other social cues, isn't as straightforward as we used to think. Context can't be ignored.
New work by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Batja Mesquita, and their colleagues suggests that this long held view might just be wrong. Simply put -- context matters. If all you had to go on was Serena's face, accuracy at identifying her expression as pride would be very low and error identifying it as anger or pain would be fairly high. It is only through having an additional context of other cues that ambiguity in her emotional state can be resolved. Of course, it may certainly be the case that a smiling face is often happy, but it need not always be. Smiles, for example, often occur when a person is embarrassed.
Detection of actual emotions, much like most other social cues, isn't as straightforward as we used to think. Context can't be ignored.
