False Smiles Research Articles

The effect of facial expression on emotional contagion and product evaluation in print advertising

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the emotional contagion theory in print ads, and expand the literature of smiling to different type of smiles and gender congruency. Emotional contagion happens when an emotion is transferred from a sender to a receiver by the synchronization of emotions from the emitter. Drawing on emotional contagion theory, the authors expand this concept and propose that smiles in static facial expressions influence product evaluation. They suggest that false smiles do not have the same impact as genuine smiles on product evaluation, and the congruence between the model gender–product in a static ad and the gender of the viewer moderates the effects. Design/methodology/approach In Experiment 1, subjects were randomly assigned to view one of the two ad treatments to guard against systematic error (e.g. bias). In Experiment 2, it was investigated whether viewing a static ad featuring a model with a false smile can result in a positive product evaluation as was the case with genuine smiles (H3). In Experiment 3, it was assumed that when consumers evaluate an ad featuring a smiling face, the facial expression influences product evaluation, and this influence is moderated by the congruence between the gender of the ad viewer and the product H gender of the model in the ad. Findings Across three experiments, the authors found that the model’s facial expression influenced the product evaluation. Second, they supported the association between a model’s facial expression and mimicry synchronization. Third, they showed that genuine smiles have a higher impact on product evaluation than false smiles. This novel result enlarges the research on genuine smiles to include false smiles. Fourth, the authors supported the gender–product congruence effect in that the gender of the ad’s reader and the model have a moderating effect on the relationship between the model’s facial expression and the reader’s product evaluation. Originality/value Marketing managers would benefit from understanding that genuine smiles can encourage positive emotions on the part of consumers via emotional contagion, which would be very useful to create a positive effect on products. The authors improved upon previous psychological theory (Gunnery et al., 2013; Hennig-Thurau et al., 2006) showing that a genuine smile results in higher evaluation scores of products presented in static ads. The theoretical explanation for this effect is the genuine smile, which involves contraction of both zygomatic major and orbicularis oculi muscles. These facial muscles can be better perceived and transmit positive emotions (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2006).

Real-time Facial Expression Recognition to Track Non-verbal Behaviors as Lie Indicators During Interview

During interview, a psychologist should pay attention to every gesture and response, both verbal and nonverbal language/behaviors, made by the client. Psychologist certainly has limitation in recognizing every gesture and response that indicates a lie, especially in interpreting nonverbal behaviors that usually occurs in a short time. In this research, a real time facial expression recognition is proposed to track nonverbal behaviors to help psychologist keep informed about the change of facial expression that indicate a lie. The method tracks eye gaze, wrinkles on the forehead, and false smile using combination of face detection and facial landmark recognition to find the facial features and image processing method to track the nonverbal behaviors in facial features. Every nonverbal behavior is recorded and logged according to the video timeline to assist the psychologist analyze the behavior of the client. The result of tracking nonverbal behaviors of face is accurate and expected to be useful assistant for the psychologists.

Perceiving happiness in an intergroup context: The role of race and attention to the eyes in differentiating between true and false smiles.

The present research comprises six experiments that investigated racial biases in the perception of positive emotional expressions. In an initial study, we demonstrated that White participants distinguished more in their happiness ratings of Duchenne ("true") and non-Duchenne ("false") smiles on White compared with Black faces (Experiment 1). In a subsequent study we replicated this effect using a different set of stimuli and non-Black participants (Experiment 2). As predicted, this bias was not demonstrated by Black participants, who did not significantly differ in happiness ratings between smile types on White and Black faces (Experiment 3). Furthermore, in addition to happiness ratings, we demonstrated that non-Black participants were also more accurate when categorizing true versus false expressions on White compared with Black faces (Experiment 4). The final two studies provided evidence for the mediating role of attention to the eyes in intergroup emotion identification. In particular, eye tracking data indicated that White participants spent more time attending to the eyes of White than Black faces and that attention to the eyes predicted biases in happiness ratings between true and false smiles on White and Black faces (Experiment 5). Furthermore, an experimental manipulation focusing participants on the eyes of targets eliminated the effects of target race or perceptions of happiness (Experiment 6). Together, the findings provide novel evidence for racial biases in the identification of positive emotions and highlight the critical role of visual attention in this process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

What’s in a smile? A review of the benefits of the clinician’s smile

For millennia, the smile has been recognised as a powerful communication device, offering benefits to both giver and receiver with few drawbacks. A sign of compassion, empathy and friendliness, smiling...

Supplemental Material for Perceiving Happiness in an Intergroup Context: The Role of Race and Attention to the Eyes in Differentiating Between True and False Smiles

Supplemental Material for Perceiving Happiness in an Intergroup Context: The Role of Race and Attention to the Eyes in Differentiating Between True and False Smiles

Perceiving emotions: Cueing social categorization processes and attentional control through facial expressions

Individuals spontaneously categorise other people on the basis of their gender, ethnicity and age. But what about the emotions they express? In two studies we tested the hypothesis that facial expressions are similar to other social categories in that they can function as contextual cues to control attention. In Experiment 1 we associated expressions of anger and happiness with specific proportions of congruent/incongruent flanker trials. We also created consistent and inconsistent category members within each of these two general contexts. The results demonstrated that participants exhibited a larger congruency effect when presented with faces in the emotional group associated with a high proportion of congruent trials. Notably, this effect transferred to inconsistent members of the group. In Experiment 2 we replicated the effects with faces depicting true and false smiles. Together these findings provide consistent evidence that individuals spontaneously utilise emotions to categorise others and that such categories determine the allocation of attentional control.

Sensitivity to Perceived Facial Trustworthiness Is Increased by Activating Self-Protection Motives

Self-protection motives have been documented to influence a range of intergroup processes, including biased categorization of racially ambiguous targets as out-group members and a heightened ability to discriminate in-group from out-group members. In this work, the influence of self-protective states is extended to interpersonal processes. Specifically, in two experiments we demonstrate that activating self-protection motives (relative to a control experience) leads to more accurate detection of facial cues associated with trustworthiness. In Experiment 1, participants with salient self-protection concerns were better able to distinguish between faces pre-rated as appearing high and low in trustworthiness. In Experiment 2, we used dynamic cues associated with trustworthiness and found that participants with active self-protection goals more accurately distinguished genuine from false smiles. These results are among the first to document the influence of self-protection motives on interpersonal judgments, thereby expanding the scope and focus of fundamental motives research.

Felt or false smiles? Volitional regulation of emotional expression in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children.

The development of volitional emotion regulation of expression was examined with a modified disappointing gift paradigm and strategy for coding children's expressions. Forty-nine boys and 49 girls aged 4, 6, and 8 were motivated to volitionally deceive an observer by false smiling, regardless of whether they received an attractive, unattractive, or no gift. Ten naïve observers watched children's videotaped behavior in random order and judged the quality of emotion and type of gift. This impression analysis indicated that children's competence to volitionally regulate their expressions increased with age. In addition, this ability was positively associated with children's emotion understanding of how to differentiate between emotion and expression. Unexpectedly, girls did not display a superior volitional regulation of expression than boys.

Blocking Mimicry Makes True and False Smiles Look the Same

Recent research suggests that facial mimicry underlies accurate interpretation of subtle facial expressions. In three experiments, we manipulated mimicry and tested its role in judgments of the genuineness of true and false smiles. Experiment 1 used facial EMG to show that a new mouthguard technique for blocking mimicry modifies both the amount and the time course of facial reactions. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants rated true and false smiles either while wearing mouthguards or when allowed to freely mimic the smiles with or without additional distraction, namely holding a squeeze ball or wearing a finger-cuff heart rate monitor. Results showed that blocking mimicry compromised the decoding of true and false smiles such that they were judged as equally genuine. Together the experiments highlight the role of facial mimicry in judging subtle meanings of facial expressions.

THE LANDSCAPE OF FICTION: The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 2009. By ORHAN PAMUK

In Orhan Pamuk's most recent novel, The Museum of Innocence (2009), the narrator comes to believe that ‘for most people life was not a joy to be embraced with a full heart but a miserable charade to be endured with a false smile’. The book is set in 1970s Istanbul, where the rich middle classes must play out their illicit passions in secret, guarded from the moral codes of a Westernising but still religious society. Lionel Trilling, in his own Charles Eliot Norton lectures (published as Sincerity and Authenticity, 1972), argued that the great nineteenth century novelists demonstrated the ‘social inauthenticity’ of society. The Museum of Innocence similarly shows up the gap between illusion and reality in 1970s Turkey. Since Pamuk read all the major nineteenth century French novelists during his formative years as an aspiring writer (as he recalls in these lectures), their influence on him is hardly surprising. (There was little tradition of novel-writing in Turkey.) Pamuk's critical thinking on fiction, both in these lectures and in his earlier book, Other Colours (2007), is directed in great part by his early immersion in those realist writers. Pamuk believes that when a novel is successful ‘we feel that the fictional world we encounter and enjoy is more real than the real world itself’, and that ‘the real measure’ of the novel's value is its ‘power to evoke the sense that life is indeed exactly like this’. Pamuk has also explored this idea in his fiction. In My Name is Red (2001) the Sultan is ‘seized by a kind of panic’ when he suspects that the book he is reading recounts not merely a story ‘but what was most unbefitting a book: reality itself’. And it is here that the terms ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental’ – taken from Schiller's essay ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ (1795-6) – have their part in the argument. No good reader, according to Pamuk, is wholly carried away by the force of the novel's reality. While the ‘naïve’ element in the reader delights in the illusion cast by the authenticity of detail and character, the ‘sentimental’ part (which Schiller and Pamuk hold to be the reflective part) is at the same time ‘fascinated by the artificiality of the text and its failure to attain reality’. Reading well, then, ‘involves a continual oscillation between these two mindsets’, just as ‘the art of the novel relies on our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory states’ (that is, in its authenticity and in its illusory side). Pamuk here uses ‘the art of the novel’ to mean both the art of reading and the art of writing novels. He contends that novelists should be naive in their playfulness and in their capacity to identify with other people, but that they should also be sentimental in their absorption in novelistic techniques of representation.

Le bon dieu est dans le detail: Is smiling the recognition of happiness?

AbstractWe question two conceptual assumptions made by Niedenthal et al.: the dichotomy between true and false smiles and the close tie between recognition and experience of emotion. An excessive dependence on everyday language suggests overly parsimonious accounts of a complex set of relations between smile, experience, and context.

Can Duchenne smiles be feigned? New evidence on felt and false smiles.

We investigated the value of the Duchenne (D) smile as a spontaneous sign of felt enjoyment. Participants either smiled spontaneously in response to amusing material (spontaneous condition) or were instructed to pose a smile (deliberate condition). Similar amounts of D and non-Duchenne (ND) smiles were observed in these 2 conditions (Experiment 1). When subsets of these smiles were presented to other participants, they generally rated spontaneous and deliberate D and ND smiles differently. Moreover, they distinguished between D smiles of varying intensity within the spontaneous condition (Experiment 2). Such a differentiation was also made when seeing the upper or lower face only (Experiment 3), but was impaired for static compared with dynamic displays (Experiment 4). The predictive value of the D smile in these judgment studies was limited compared with other features such as asymmetry, apex duration, and nonpositive facial actions, and was only significant for ratings of the upper face and static displays. These findings raise doubts about the reliability and validity of the D smile and question the usefulness of facial descriptions in identifying true feelings of enjoyment.

Review of Two Documentary Films from First Run/Icarus Films: How Happy Can You Be? and Teeth

How Happy Can You Be? and Teeth are two competently made, yet less than completely satisfying, documentary films distributed by First Run/Icarus Films in 2005 and 2007, respectively, that rely heavily on statistics to examine smiles from different perspectives. Teeth: An Investigation into Consumer Culture Identification and Good Smiles-a. 26-minute film by Alice Arnold-is less engaging of two both intrinsically and in its realization as documentary. Essentially an investigation into socio-cultural impetus driving 300% increase (from 1999 to 2004) in America's whitening market, Teeth provides considerable, but sometimes-suspect, statistical information while featuring interspliced interviews with psychoanalyst, three dentists, seven individuals who feel compelled for variety of reasons to consider cosmetic dentistry, and grill-wearer. These include frugal Leo, who does not like his because of missing initially fears he couldn't afford it, yet finally has all his replaced by dentures (the cheaper alternative to implants) only to discover that eating with is like having sex wearing condom; crooked-toothed, middle-aged Austrian immigrant who is surprised to be told to get braces, once in America, but attributes American obsession with to advertising . . . American corporate imagery is all white big smile; an Asian-American insecure his yellowish teeth; young woman who, told by her dentist to have her whitened to younger, resents to match current elevated of whiteness . . . of cleanliness, and feels that new phase of whitening, on top of straightening, is whole new level of beautification, and commodification; and Markus Wailand, handsome but gap-toothed actor who is advised by producers that those on TV need perfect looks, and that all anyone will remember him is his tooth gap. The dentists, one of whom quick-fixes of ordinary people who appear on Montel Williams Show, discuss procedures and expense of having whitened or repaired, note that people want their fixed because an smile is important to dating (84%), friendship (71%), getting job (74%), and succeeding at work (75%)-yet source of these statistics is an Invisaline Smile Survey. They conclude, Everybody wants to look good . . . . That's what our society is all about while acknowledging that attractive are as well as health issue. In this dentists agree with psychoanalyst Michael Moskowitz, who asserts that this false smile is unique to United States and that we've developed this norm for showing that is in other ways an expression of class and power, not only because Freud interprets dreams losing one's as representing loss of one's penis and thus a loss of power, but also because dentistry is expensive. While opining that dental economics makes quality of one's race issue as well as class issue, Moskowitz points out that hip-hop culture's preference for grills is rejection of the typical white man's attitude of allwhite teeth that nonetheless, in words of pleased grill-wearer, similarly signifies . . . I got more money . . . which means I got more power. (The best audio material in documentary is hip-hop song, Show Your Teeth, that accompanies this segment.) The documentary is visually unimaginative in merely running quotations and statistics across screen and in focusing excessively on talking (and reading) heads, but its primary flaw is that it is just too obvious: Its conclusion and central thesis, that there's an industry out there that profits from making people feel like they need certain kind of teeth, articulated by Moskowitz, does not go beyond what nearly everyone already knows. How Happy Can You Be?-a 52-minute film by Line Hatland-has advantage of examining far more elusive topic which there is considerably more that average person might want to know. …

Sex Differences in Self-awareness of Smiling During a Mock Job Interview

The present study examined sex differences in awareness of smiling behavior during a job interview, along with intended outcomes of false smiling. Male and female participants were assigned to the interviewee role of a mock job interview and were videotaped. Results indicate that women were more self-aware of false, but not genuine, smiling. In addition, women reported using false smiles to mask negative emotion and to appear enthusiastic more than did men. Naive judges rated women who smiled in an attempt to mask negative emotion more harshly than men who smiled for this reason. Implications of these findings for the understanding of sex differences in smiling are discussed.

The Atrocity Repetition

The Atrocity Repetition Davis Schneiderman J. G. Ballard: Quotes Edited by V. Vale and Mike Ryan RE; Search Publications http://researchpubs.com 415 pages; paper, $19.99 The signature obsessions of J. G. Ballard's long career—the elucidation of linkages between modernity and atrocity, the exteriorization of the human consciousness through the development of the technological, the extemporization of a popular culture seemingly unaware of its own implications —not only predominate the new RE/Search volume, J. G. Ballard: Quotes, but they populate its four-hundred-plus pages to such an extent that the effect is similarto finding oneselfinside the unsteady cylinder of a Ballard novel. Of course, this book is neither Empire ofthe Sun (1984) nor Crash (1973), but the position of Jim in the former, or Vaughan in the latter, is replicated in Quotes as the necessity of an almost surrealist de-realization of the world. First, there are the sudden delights, as when it is asserted that the American President "bears about as much relationship to the real business of running America as does Colonel Sanders to the business of frying chicken." Then, the clever metaphors: "If the sun is the ultimate TV station, then the beach is its most popular program, and life at a holiday resort resembles a chaotic rehearsal for the last great sitcom, a fusion of Baywatch and Armageddon." Before long, we reach the more sinisterjuxtaposition of man and machine, science and imagination, the place where "the ultimate Surrealist act would be to take a revolver and fire at random into a crowd." In the stranger moments of Quotes, Ballard's readers will indeed find the chance meeting on a dissecting table comprised ofa sewing machine and an umbrella (Breton through Lautréamont) that not only characterizes the surrealism he admires so much, but the enhancements he has made to its technique: "The ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis... ," or "Working in an office for a great many years can be one of the most crucifying experiences. You are forcedto repress your biological needto kill everyone around you." If we look more closely at this quotation, the repetition of labor tasks that die office worker performs presumably deadens the "soul" of the individual, and would thus be responsible for the repression ofthis interior killer instinct; accordingly, repetition becomes one of the means by which this book critiques and contributes to its own milieu. At its most successful, Quotes (as in the section, "JGB's Art Show") uses serial quotations from the publications Heavy Metal, Artforum, Blitz, Spike, and Evergreen Review to construct the narrative of Ballard's exhibition ofcrashed cars (held at the New Arts Laboratory in London, 1969) as an "experiment " or a "confrontation" between the bourgeois art consumer and this display of atrocity. This test case for the novel Crash offered guests prodigious amounts of alcohol, the chance to be interviewed on closed-circuit TV by a topless woman, and an opening night that had guests "breaking the bottles of red wine over the cars, smashing the glasses, grabbing the topless girl and dragging her into the back of one of the cars." The multiple quotations that tell this story never feel repetitive, and the structure is more like a slightly skewed Rashômon than the filing and collating of a bored secretary. Still, several sections tend toward the latter, as when the opening division ("The Future") describes totalitarianism in one quotation as "ingratiating and subservient, rather than using the jackboot," only to be followed, in the next quotation, by a characterization that the system will be "subservient and ingratiating, the false smile ofthe bored waiter rather than the jackboot." Yes, of course, this is part of the point, and that such repetitions do not go unnoticed is owing in part to the book's easy-to-use format. Topics are conveniently grouped together, extractions from novels and interviews and short stories and essays are freely interwoven —and astute readers will no doubt discover enough personally instructive meta-commentary hidden throughout the text to stay entertained, as for instance: "Having been a reviewer myself, I can always tell when somebody has stopped...

RECOGNITION OF SMILING FACES USING NEURAL NETWORKS AND SPCA

Research on "man-machine interface" has increased in many fields of engineering and its application to facial expressions recognition is expected. The eigenface method by using the principal component analysis (PCA) is popular in this research field. However, it is not easy to compute eigenvectors with a large matrix if the cost of calculation when applying it for time-varying processing is taken into consideration. In this paper, in order to achieve high-speed PCA, the simple principal component analysis (SPCA) is applied to compress the dimensionality of portions that constitute a face. A value of cos θ is calculated using an eigenvector by SPCA as well as a gray-scale image vector of each picture pattern. By using neural networks (NNs), the difference in the value of cos θ between the true and the false (plastic) smiles is clarified and the true smile is discriminated. Finally, in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed face classification method for true or false smiles, computer simulations are done with real images. Furthermore, an experiment using the self-organisation map (SOM) is also conducted as a comparison.

The Social Context of Nonverbal Behavior

The Social Context of Nonverbal Behavior

Contagion of emotion from the expressions of genuine and false smiles

The findings of a study by Cahn and Polich (2009) suggests that there is an effect of a meditative state on three event-related potential (ERP) brain markers of “low-level” auditory attention (i.e., acoustic representations in sensory memory) in expert meditators: the N1, the P2, and the P3a. The current study built on these findings by examining trait and state effects of meditation on the passive auditory mismatch negativity (MMN), N1, and P2 ERPs. We found that the MMN was significantly larger in meditators than non-meditators regardless of whether they were meditating or not (a trait effect), and that N1 amplitude was significantly attenuated during meditation in non-meditators but not expert meditators (an interaction between trait and state). These outcomes suggest that low-level attention is superior in long-term meditators in general. In contrast, low-level attention is reduced in non-meditators when they are asked to meditate for the first time, possibly due to auditory fatigue or cognitive overload.

Why Smiles Generate Leniency

The authors investigated the social significance of human smiles, specifically the penchant for transgressors who smile to be judged more leniently than those who do not. Of particular interest was whether different types of smiles generate different degrees of leniency and what mediated the effect. Subjects judged a case of possible academic misconduct. Materials included a photograph of a female target displaying a neutral expression, felt smile, false smile, or miserable smile. Smiling targets received more leniency than nonsmiling targets, although they were not seen as less guilty. The type of smile did not significantly moderate the amount of leniency shown. Of the variables evaluated for mediating the smile-leniency effect, such as perceiving the target as more likable, submissive, or diplomatic, the one that best accounted for the effect was perceiving the target as a trustworthy person. The implication seems to be—if in trouble, smile.

Felt, false, and miserable smiles

Theoretically based distinctions linked to measurable differences in appearance are described for three smiles: felt smiles (spontaneous expressions of positive emotion); false smiles (deliberate attempts to appear as if positive emotion is felt when it isn't); and, miserable smiles (acknowledgements of feeling miserable but not intending to do much about it). Preliminary evidence supports some of the hypotheses about how these three kinds of smile differ.