According to a common sense theory, facial expressions signal specific emotions to people of all ages and therefore provide children easy access to the emotions of those around them. The evidence, however, does not support that account. Instead, children’s understanding of facial expressions is poor and changes qualitatively and slowly over the course of development. Initially, children divide facial expressions into two simple categories (feels good, feels bad). These broad categories are then gradually differentiated until an adult system of discrete (...) categories is achieved, likely in the teen years. Children’s understanding of most specific emotions begins not with facial expressions, but with their understanding of the emotion’s antecedents and behavioral consequences. (shrink)

Social referencing informs and regulates one’s relation with the environment as a function of the perceived appraisals of social partners. Increased emphasis on relational and social contexts in the study of emotion makes this interpersonal process particularly relevant to the field. However, theoretical conceptualizations and empirical operationalizations of social referencing are disjointed across domains and populations of study. This article seeks to unite and refine the study of this construct by providing a clear and comprehensive definition of social referencing. Our (...) perspective presents social referencing and social appraisal as coterminous processes and emphasizes the importance of a relational and interpersonal approach to the study of emotion. We conclude by outlining possible lines of research on this construct. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe recognition of emotional facial expressions is often subject to contextual influence, particularly when the face and the context convey similar emotions. We investigated whether spontaneous, incidental affective theory of mind inferences made while reading vignettes describing social situations would produce context effects on the identification of same-valenced emotions as well as differently-valenced emotions conveyed by subsequently presented faces. Crucially, we found an effect of context on reaction times in both experiments while, in line with previous work, we found evidence (...) for a context effect on accuracy only in Experiment 1. This demonstrates that affective theory of mind inferences made at the pragmatic level of a text can automatically, contextually influence the perceptual processing of emotional facial expressions in a separate task even when those emotions are of a distinctive valence. Thus, our novel findings suggest that language acts as a contex... (shrink)

Drawing on research reviewed in this special section, the present article discusses how various contextual factors impact on production and decoding of emotion-related facial activity. Although emotion-related variables often contribute to activation of prototypical “emotion expressions” and perceivers can often infer emotional meanings from these facial configurations, neither process is invariant or direct. Many facial movements are directed towards or away from events in the shared environment, and their effects depend on these relational orientations. Facial activity is not only a (...) medium for descriptive representation of internal affective states, but also a means of adjusting to, and operating on, external objects, and of influencing other people’s appraisals of those objects. (shrink)

This article explores interpersonal functions of emotional mimicry under the absence versus the presence of visual contact between the interacting partners. We review relevant literature and stress that previous studies on the role of emotional mimicry were focused on imitative responses to facial displays. We also show that the rules explaining why people mimic facial expressions may be inapplicable when visual signals are unavailable (e.g., people attending an online meeting have their cameras off). Overall, our review suggests that emotional mimicry (...) functionally adapts to whether the perceiver and the expresser can see each other. We, therefore, argue that blocking visual contact between them may provide insight into emotional mimicry's social functions, thereby clarifying its role in fostering affiliation and emotional understanding. (shrink)

While numerous studies have examined the relationships between facial actions and emotions, they have yet to account for the ways that specific spontaneous facial expressions map onto emotional experiences induced without expressive intent. Moreover, previous studies emphasized that a fine-grained investigation of facial components could establish the coherence of facial actions with actual internal states. Therefore, this study aimed to accumulate evidence for the correspondence between spontaneous facial components and emotional experiences. We reinvestigated data from previous research which secretly recorded (...) spontaneous facial expressions of Japanese participants as they watched film clips designed to evoke four different target emotions: surprise, amusement, disgust, and sadness. The participants rated their emotional experiences via a self-reported questionnaire of sixteen emotions. These spontaneous facial expressions were coded using the Facial Action Coding System, the gold standard for classifying visible facial movements. We corroborated each facial action that was present in the emotional experiences by applying stepwise regression models. The results found that spontaneous facial components occurred in ways that cohere to the their evolutionary functions based on the rating values of emotional experiences (e.g., the inner brow raiser might be involved in the evaluation of novelty). This study provided new empirical evidence for the correspondence between each spontaneous facial component and first-person internal states of emotion as reported by the expresser. (shrink)

In this review, we highlight evidence suggesting that concepts represented in language are used to create a perception of emotion from the constant ebb and flow of other people’s facial muscle movements. In this “construction hypothesis,” (cf. Gendron, Lindquist, Barsalou, & Barrett, 2012) (see also Barrett, 2006b; Barrett, Lindquist, & Gendron, 2007; Barrett, Mesquita, & Gendron, 2011), language plays a constitutive role in emotion perception because words ground the otherwise highly variable instances of an emotion category. We demonstrate that language (...) plays a constitutive role in emotion perception by discussing findings from behavior, neuropsychology, development, and neuroimaging. We close by discussing implications of a constructionist view for the science of emotion. (shrink)

Facial emotional recognition is something used often in our daily lives. How does the brain process the face search? Can taste modify such a process? This study employed two tastes to investigate the cross-modal interaction between taste and emotional face recognition. The behavior responses and the event-related potential were applied to analyze the interaction between taste and face processing. Behavior data showed that when detecting a negative target face with a positive face as a distractor, the participants perform the task (...) faster with an acidic taste than with sweet. No interaction effect was observed with correct response ratio analysis. The early and mid-stage [early posterior negativity ] components have shown that sweet and acidic tastes modified the ERP components with the affective face search process in the ERP results. No interaction effect was observed in the late-stage component. Our data have extended the understanding of the cross-modal mechanism and provided electrophysiological evidence that affective facial processing could be influenced by sweet and acidic tastes. (shrink)

We proposed and tested the notion of a bidirectional influence of emotion expressions and context. In two studies, we found that the expressions shown by supporters and opponents...

ABSTRACTThe present research tested the notion that emotion expression and context perception are bidirectionally related. Specifically, in two studies focusing on moral violations and positive moral deviations respectively, we presented participants with short vignettes describing behaviours that were either moral, polite or unusual together with a picture of the emotional reaction of a person who supposedly had been a witness to the event. Participants rated both the emotional reactions observed and their own moral appraisal of the situation described. In both (...) studies, we found that situational context influenced how emotional reactions to this context were rated and in turn, the emotional expression shown in reaction to a situation influenced the appraisal of the situation. That is, neither the moral events nor the emotion expressions were judged in an absolute fashion. Rather, the perception of one also depended on the other. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to discuss theoretical arguments concerning the idea that emotional mimicry is an intrinsic part of our social being and thus can be considered a social act. For this, we will first present the theoretical assumptions underlying the Emotional Mimicry as Social Regulator view. We then provide a brief overview of recent developments in emotional mimicry research and specifically discuss new developments regarding the role of emotional mimicry in actual interactions and relationships, and individual differences (...) in emotional mimicry. We conclude with open questions for future research. (shrink)

For more than a century expressions have been approached as bidimensional, static, instantaneous, self-contained, well-defined, and universal signals. These assumptions are starting to be empirically reconsidered: this special section of Emotion Review includes reviews on the physical, social, and cultural dynamics of expressions, and on the complex ways in which, throughout the lifespan, facial behavior and emotion are perceived and categorized by primates’ and humans’ brain. All these advances are certainly paving the way for new exciting approaches to facial behavior (...) more likely to strike an appropriate balance between description and explanation. (shrink)