Abstract
Facial expressions of emotion are nonverbal behaviors that allow us to interact efficiently in social life and respond to events affecting our welfare. This article reviews 21 studies, published between 1932 and 2015, examining the production of facial expressions of emotion by blind people. It particularly discusses the impact of visual experience on the development of this behavior from birth to adulthood. After a discussion of three methodological considerations, the review of studies reveals that blind subjects demonstrate differing capacities for producing spontaneous expressions and voluntarily posed expressions. Seventeen studies provided evidence that blind and sighted spontaneously produce the same pattern of facial expressions, even if some variations can be found, reflecting facial and body movements specific to blindness or differences in intensity and control of emotions in some specific contexts. This suggests that lack of visual experience seems to not have a major impact when this behavior is generated spontaneously in real emotional contexts. In contrast, eight studies examining voluntary expressions indicate that blind individuals have difficulty posing emotional expressions. The opportunity for prior visual observation seems to affect performance in this case. Finally, we discuss three new directions for research to provide additional and strong evidence for the debate regarding the innate or the culture-constant learning character of the production of emotional facial expressions by blind individuals: the link between perception and production of facial expressions, the impact of display rules in the absence of vision, and the role of other channels in expression of emotions in the context of blindness.
Highlights
From birth to adulthood, emotions, whether expressed or perceived as expressed by others, remain essential common references for effective social interaction (Matsumoto & Willingham, 2009; Sander & Scherer, 2009)
The facial musculature is capable of over 40 independent actions, resulting in an extremely large number of possible expressions. Of this large potential repertoire, strong evidence exists that a small number of specific facial configurations are universally and discretely produced when emotions are elicited (Ekman, 1993)
FACS coding showed some specific AUs that prevail in blind children’s faces, such as head movements, eye closure and mouth opening associated with Bblindisms^. These results suggest that even though similarities were found between expressions produced by blind and sighted children, blind children conform less to the display rules that determine in which situations, which emotions should be expressed or masked and the degree of control exercised over their intensity
Summary
Emotions, whether expressed or perceived as expressed by others, remain essential common references for effective social interaction (Matsumoto & Willingham, 2009; Sander & Scherer, 2009). Results showed that blind and sighted children have the same capacities to mask a negative emotion with a false smile that has been observed in adults (Matsumoto & Willingham, 2009), but blind children were less likely to refer spontaneously to control their facial expression.
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