Happy Film Research Articles

The effects of emotional films and subtitle types on eye movement patterns

BackgroundIn Taiwan, the use of subtitle is common in TV programs and movies. However, studies on subtitles mostly focus on foreign language learning and film subtitle translation. Few studies address how subtitle types and emotion-laden films affect the viewers' eye movement patterns. PurposeWe aim to examine how the emotion type of film (happy, sad, angry, fear, or neutral) and subtitle type (meaningful subtitle, no subtitle, or meaningless subtitle) affect the dwell times and fixation counts in the subtitle area. MethodsThis study is a 5 (emotion type of film) × 3 (subtitle type) between-participants design. There were 15 participants per condition, resulting in a total of 225 participants. After watching a film, participants filled out a self-reported questionnaire regarding this film. ResultsThe subtitled films have more fixation counts and dwell time for the meaningful subtitle compared to meaningless subtitle and no subtitle. The dwell time was longer on the subtitle area for the sad film than the neutral and happy films. Also, the dwell time was longer on the subtitle area for the fear film than the happy film. There were more fixation counts on the subtitle area for the sad film than the angry and happy films. ConclusionsThe subtitle meaning is critical in directing overt attention. Also, overt attention directed to the subtitle area is affected by the different emotion types of films.

Individual differences in sadness coherence: Associations with dispositional affect and age.

The current laboratory-based study examined individual differences in sadness coherence (i.e., coherence between objectively coded sad facial expressions and heart rate in response to a sad film clip) and associations with dispositional affect (i.e., positive and negative affect, extraversion, neuroticism) and age in a sample of younger and older adults. Results showed that (a) greater sadness coherence was associated with lower dispositional negative affect (i.e., greater positive to negative affect ratio; lower neuroticism) and (b) older adults had greater sadness coherence than younger adults. Findings remained stable when controlling for covariates. Results were specific to coherence characterized by an inverse association between heart rate and facial expressions of sadness (i.e., did not emerge for absolute changes in heart rate or skin conductance), specific to sad facial expressions (i.e., did not emerge for happy facial expressions), specific to stimulus (i.e., did not emerge for sadness coherence in response to a happy film clip), generalized across overall levels of emotional responding (i.e., sad facial expressions; heart rate reactivity), and remained stable when controlling for expressive suppression. These findings demonstrate that individuals who exhibit greater sadness coherence experience more favorable dispositional affect, consistent with evolutionary-functionalist models of emotion, and that sadness coherence is higher in late life, consistent with developmental accounts of heightened reactivity to loss in late life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Eye gaze and facial displays of emotion during emotional film clips in remitted patients with bipolar disorder.

Aberrant emotional reactivity is a putative endophenotype for bipolar disorder (BD), but the findings of behavioral studies are often negative due to suboptimal sensitivity of the employed paradigms. This study aimed to investigate whether visual gaze patterns and facial displays of emotion during emotional film clips can reveal subtle behavioral abnormalities in remitted BD patients. Thirty-eight BD patients in full or partial remission and 40 healthy controls viewed 7 emotional film clips. These included happy, sad, and neutral scenarios and scenarios involving winning, risk-taking, and thrill-seeking behavior of relevance to the BD phenotype. Eye gaze and facial expressions were recorded during the film clips, and participants rated their emotional reactions after each clip. BD patients showed a negative bias in both facial displays of emotion and self-rated emotional responses. Specifically, patients exhibited more fearful facial expressions during all film clips. This was accompanied by less positive self-rated emotions during the winning and happy film clips, and more negative emotions during the risk-taking/thrill-related film clips. These findings suggest that BD is associated with trait-related abnormalities in subtle behavioral displays of emotion processing. Future studies comparing patients with BD and unipolar depression are warranted to clarify whether these differences are specific to BD. If so, assessments of visual gaze and facial displays of emotion during emotional film clips may have the potential to be implemented in clinical assessments to aid diagnostic accuracy.

Evaluative and Psychophysiological Responses to Short Film Clips of Different Emotional Content

Abstract. The study presents self-report and psychophysiological data obtained in response to short film clips representing scenes related to different emotions. This was done in order to obtain evidence on the structure of positive and negative affective states following a combined dimensional/categorical approach to emotion and based on responses to stimuli that are more realistic than the static pictures usually employed in the study of emotion. Affective ratings and self-report measures showed a differential structure of the response to positive and negative films (Experiment 1). While all negative films were rated as low in valence and high in arousal, positive films were differentiated into arousing (happy and pleasure contents) and de-arousing (relax contents) categories. A more complex pattern emerged in Experiment 2, using two psychophysiological measures that are differentially sensitive to the main affective dimensions of valence and arousal, skin conductance response (SCR) and facial electromyography (fEMG). First, high arousal positive and negative films produced larger skin conductance responses. Second, fEMG measures showed differentiated response patterns within the positive and negative film categories. Within the positive category, happy and relaxing films had opposed effects, with happy films increasing and relax films decreasing activity over the zygomaticus muscle region. In the case of negative films, only those eliciting disgust produced a differentiated pattern of fEMG activity characterized by large corrugator responses and a modest increase of zygomatic responses. These results are discussed in relation to the adequacy of the dimensional and categorical approaches to emotion, the usefulness of combining subjective and psychophysiological measures, and the advantages of using realistic, dynamic stimuli for the study of emotion.

Age‐Related Differences in Emotion Regulation within the Context of Sad and Happy TV Programs

ABSTRACTThe marketing literature on program context includes several studies on the influence of program‐induced positive and negative emotions on the evaluation of embedded television advertisements. While the majority of these studies have been conducted with younger adults, new discoveries on the differentiated processes of emotion regulation among younger and older adults are reviving interest in this topic. The present study examined the impact of television program context on program‐induced affective reactions and on the processing of embedded television advertisements among younger and older adults. Program‐induced mood valence was manipulated by using excerpts from sad and happy films. This research shows that affective reactions elicited by sad and happy television programs, as well as attitude toward the advertisement, differ between younger and older adults. The level of sadness reported by older adults was lower than that of younger adults within a sad program context. The results also show a negative influence of a sad (versus a happy) program on attitude toward the advertisement among younger adults but not among older adults. These results confirm that in advancing age, it is possible to shape emotional responses to suit regulation goals.

Damage to left frontal regulatory circuits produces greater positive emotional reactivity in frontotemporal dementia

Positive emotions foster social relationships and motivate thought and action. Dysregulation of positive emotion may give rise to debilitating clinical symptomatology such as mania, risk-taking, and disinhibition. Neuroanatomically, there is extensive evidence that the left hemisphere of the brain, and the left frontal lobe in particular, plays an important role in positive emotion generation. Although prior studies have found that left frontal injury decreases positive emotion, it is not clear whether selective damage to left frontal emotion regulatory systems can actually increase positive emotion. We measured happiness reactivity in 96 patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a neurodegenerative disease that targets emotion-relevant neural systems and causes alterations in positive emotion (i.e., euphoria and jocularity), and in 34 healthy controls. Participants watched a film clip designed to elicit happiness and a comparison film clip designed to elicit sadness while their facial behavior, physiological reactivity, and self-reported emotional experience were monitored. Whole-brain voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analyses revealed that atrophy in predominantly left hemisphere fronto-striatal emotion regulation systems including left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior insula, and striatum was associated with greater happiness facial behavior during the film (pFWE < .05). Atrophy in left anterior insula and bilateral frontopolar cortex was also associated with higher cardiovascular reactivity (i.e., heart rate and blood pressure) but not self-reported positive emotional experience during the happy film (p < .005, uncorrected). No regions emerged as being associated with greater sadness reactivity, which suggests that left-lateralized fronto-striatal atrophy is selectively associated with happiness dysregulation. Whereas previous models have proposed that left frontal injury decreases positive emotional responding, we argue that selective disruption of left hemisphere emotion regulating systems can impair the ability to suppress positive emotions such as happiness.

The role of emotional engagement and mood valence in retrieval fluency of mood incongruent autobiographical memory

Background: Retrieval of opposite mood autobiographical memories serves emotion regulation, yet the factors influencing this ability are poorly understood.Methods: Three studies examined the effect of mood valence (sad vs. happy) and degree of emotional engagement on fluency of mood incongruent retrieval by manipulating emotional engagement and examining the effect of emotional film clips on the Fluency of Autobiographical Memory task.Results: Following both sad and happy film clips, participants who received emotionally engaging instructions exhibited a greater recall latency of the first opposite mood memory, and had generated less such memories than those receiving emotionally disengaging instructions (Studies 1 and 2). A happy mood induction resulted in recollection of fewer mood incongruent memories compared to a sad mood induction. Providing emotionally engaging instructions was found to specifically hinder mood incongruent retrieval, without impairing mood congruent retrieval (Study 3).Conclusion: High emotional engagement seems to impair the retrieval of mood incongruent memories. Being in a happy mood may also partially impair such retrieval. Implications regarding emotional regulation are discussed.

Effects of Emotional State on Decision Making Time

The study sought to investigate the effects of being happy and sad on decision making time. First year college students participated in the study, 47 of them watched a happy film while 38 watched a sad film. Both groups were asked to answer the same set of 12-item dilemma questions to test their decision making process relative to time consumed in making decisions. The experiment yielded significant results. Using the chi-square test, the computed value of 38.91 was found to be significant at 0.05 level of significance. The majority of the subjects who watched a happy film decided faster compared to those who watched a sad film, consuming more time in deciding what could be done with regards to the situation given. Sadness may shape people's decisions by coloring the content of their thoughts. Along with a negative mood, people's perceptions, thoughts, and judgments are often distorted, interfering with people's ability to process information while positive-affect condition showed less confusion among the decision makers having more early information processing in making decisions.

The interplay between mood and language comprehension: Evidence from P600 to semantic reversal anomalies

Little is known about the relationship between language and emotion. Vissers et al. (2010) investigated the effects of mood on the processing of syntactic violations, as indexed by P600. An interaction was observed between mood and syntactic correctness for which three explanations were offered: one in terms of syntactic processing, one in terms of heuristic processing, and one in terms of more general factors like attention and/or motivation. In this experiment, we further determined the locus of the effects of emotional state on language comprehension by investigating the effects of mood on the processing of semantic reversal anomalies (e.g., “the cat that fled from the mice”), in which heuristics play a key role. The main findings were as follows. The mood induction was effective: participants were happier after watching happy film clips and sadder after watching sad film clips compared to baseline. For P600, a mood by semantic plausibility interaction was obtained reflecting a broadly distributed P600 effect for the happy mood vs. absence of a P600 for the sad mood condition. Correlation analyses confirmed that changes in P600 in happy mood were accompanied by changes in emotional state. Given that semantic reversal anomalies are syntactically unambiguous, the P600 modulation by mood cannot be explained by syntactic factors. The semantic plausibility by mood interaction can be accounted for in terms of (1) heuristic processing (stronger reliance on a good enough representation of the input in happy mood than sad mood), and/or (2) more general factors like attention (e.g., more attention to semantic reversals in happy mood than sad mood).

Associations between respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity and internalizing and externalizing symptoms are emotion specific

Internalizing and externalizing disorders are often, though inconsistently in studies of young children, associated with low baseline levels of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). RSA is thus considered to reflect the capacity for flexible and regulated affective reactivity and a general propensity for psychopathology. However, studies assessing RSA reactivity to emotional challenges tend to report more consistent associations with internalizing than with externalizing disorders, although it is unclear whether this is a function of the type of emotion challenges used. In the present study, we examined whether baseline RSA was associated with internalizing and/or externalizing severity in a sample of 273 young children (ages 5-6) with elevated symptoms of psychopathology. Following motivation-based models of emotion, we also tested whether RSA reactivity during withdrawal-based (fear, sadness) and approach-based (happiness, anger) emotion inductions was differentially associated with internalizing and externalizing symptoms, respectively. Baseline RSA was not associated with externalizing or internalizing symptom severity. However, RSA reactivity to specific emotional challenges was associated differentially with each symptom domain. As expected, internalizing symptom severity was associated with greater RSA withdrawal (increased arousal) during fearful and sad film segments. Conversely, externalizing symptom severity was related to blunted RSA withdrawal during a happy film segment. The use of theoretically derived stimuli may be important in characterizing the nature of the deficits in emotion processing that differentiate the internalizing and externalizing domains of psychopathology.

The implicit association task as a measure of emotional eating

For many years, emotional eating has been measured by means of self-report questionnaires, which retrospectively measure eating in response to (mainly negative) emotions. However, some researchers suggest that these questionnaires may not be the best way to assess emotional eating, as people are generally not very good at recalling their emotions, their eating behaviour, and the association between the two. In addition, because the concept of ‘emotional eating’ has gained notion in the general population, people might be biased when filling out these questionnaires. Recent studies found that scores on emotional eating scales are poor predictors of food intake after experiencing negative or positive emotions, which could be explained by the aforementioned problems with these scales. The present (ongoing) study investigates the usefulness of a single-category Implicit Association Test (IAT) as a measure of emotional eating. This IAT consists of neutral words, positive emotional words, negative emotional words, and food pictures. Participants perform the IAT, and subsequently watch a neutral, happy or sad film excerpt to induce a neutral, positive or negative mood, respectively. Food intake is then measured by means of an alleged taste test. We hypothesize (1) that participants identified by the IAT as emotional eaters consume more food in the emotion conditions than in the control condition, and (2) that in the emotion conditions, the emotional eaters show higher food intake than non-emotional eaters. Results will be discussed at the meeting.

Voluntary Emotion Suppression Modifies Psychophysiological Responses to Films

A fundamental aspect of successful social interaction is the fact people do not always experience or express emotions to their fullest extent but instead control them in a context-dependent manner. Emotion regulation involves the manipulation of subjective experience, behavior, and physiology. Previous researches have studied autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses during emotion regulation using only positive and negative stimuli without distinguishing between emotions, or it has focused on one specific emotion. Given the differences of ANS reactions to different categories of emotional stimuli, our study aims at comparing the physiological activity during emotion attending and emotion suppression using specific and distinct categories of emotions. Fifty subjects were presented with five films, inducing one of five emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, peacefulness, and disgust. While viewing the films, participants were instructed to perform an attending and a suppression task. We evaluated the following physiological measures as participants engaged in these tasks: skin conductance response (SCR), heart rate (HR), and activity of zygomatic and corrugator muscles. Performing a suppression task when viewing the happy and disgusting film clips resulted in diminished, respectively, zygomatic and corrugator muscle activities. Emotion regulation leads to a lower HR when viewing the happy film, and a higher SCR when viewing the fear-inducing film. The effects of emotional control on EMG and HR are observed on the emotions that drive the most important physiological changes in the noncontrol setting, while the increased SCR for the fear-inducing film indicates that the conscious and volitional regulation of emotion has selective effect on fear emotion as compared to happiness, disgust, sadness, and peacefulness.

The Relationship of Language and Emotion: N400 Support for an Embodied View of Language Comprehension

According to embodied theories, the symbols used by language are meaningful because they are grounded in perception, action, and emotion. In contrast, according to abstract symbol theories, meaning arises from the syntactic combination of abstract, amodal symbols. If language is grounded in internal bodily states, then one would predict that emotion affects language. Consistent with this, advocates of embodied theories propose a strong link between emotion and language [Havas, D., Glenberg, A. M., & Rinck, M. Emotion simulation during language comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14, 436-441, 2007; Niedenthal, P. M. Embodying emotion. Science, 316, 1002-1005, 2007]. The goal of this study was to test abstract symbol vs. embodied views of language by investigating whether mood affects semantic processing. To this aim, we induced different emotional states (happy vs. sad) by presenting film clips that displayed fragments from a happy movie or a sad movie. The clips were presented before and during blocks of sentences in which the cloze probability of mid-sentence critical words varied (high vs. low). Participants read sentences while ERPs were recorded. The mood induction procedure was successful: Participants watching the happy film clips scored higher on a mood scale than those watching the sad clips. For N400, mood by cloze probability interactions were obtained. The N400 cloze effect was strongly reduced in the sad mood compared with the happy mood condition. Furthermore, a difference in late positivity was only present for the sad mood condition. The mood by semantic processing interaction observed for N400 supports embodied theories of meaning and challenges abstract symbol theories that assume that processing of word meaning reflects a modular process.

Emotional and physiological responses to normative and idiographic positive stimuli in bipolar disorder

Few studies have examined differences in emotional responding among distinct types of positive stimuli. This is important to understand both for individuals characterized by extreme positive mood (i.e., bipolar disorder) and healthy adults. Using a multi-method within-subjects design, the current study examined physiological, behavioral, and self-reported responses to normative (film) and idiographic (memory) happy stimuli in bipolar (BD; n=25) and healthy control groups (CTL; n=23). For both groups, the happy films were associated with greater self-reported and behavioral displays of positive emotion compared to the happy memory. Furthermore, the BD group displayed greater cardiac vagal tone - a putative marker of positive emotion - across both the film and memory. Normative stimuli were more potent elicitors of positive emotion compared to idiographic stimuli. The study provided further evidence for cardiac vagal tone as a potential biomarker of extreme positive emotion in BD.

The influence of mood on the processing of syntactic anomalies: Evidence from P600

In several domains of psychology it has been shown that mood influences the way in which we process information. So far, little is known about the relation between mood and processes of language comprehension. In the present study we explore, whether, and if so how, mood affects the processing of syntactic anomalies in real time by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). To this aim we compared the P600 effect to subject–verb agreement errors relative to correct sentences while ERPs were recorded and mood was manipulated by presenting happy or sad film clips. The prediction was that if emotional state affects processes of language comprehension this should be reflected by an interaction between mood and P600. The results were as follows: first, the mood induction procedure was effective: participants were happier after watching happy film clips and sadder after watching sad film clips compared to baseline. Second, for P600 a mood by syntactic correctness interaction was obtained for the midline and lateral electrodes. The interaction reflected a broadly distributed P600 effect for the happy mood condition and a strong reduction in P600 effect for the sad mood condition. Correlation analyses confirmed that the observed changes in P600 effect were accompanied by reliable changes in emotional state. The present ERP findings demonstrate that mood interacts with processes of language comprehension. Three possible explanations for the mood by syntactic correctness interaction are discussed; one in terms of syntactic processing, one in terms of heuristic processing, and one in terms of more general factors like attention and/or motivation.

Fetal response to induced maternal emotions

This study investigated the relationship between fetal movements and acute maternal emotional changes during pregnancy. Two empirically validated feature film clips were used for the external generation of two subjectively and facially well-characterized target emotions: happiness and sadness. We simultaneously monitored separate fetal arm, leg, and trunk movements by means of two ultrasound apparatuses while maternal emotions were manipulated by film clip presentation. The number of fetal arm movements, but not the duration, was increased when pregnant women were being shown a happy film. Both the number and the duration of fetal arm movements decreased with the sad film presentation. Neither the presentation of happiness nor the presentation of sadness affected fetal leg or trunk movements. These findings suggest that induced emotions in pregnant women primarily affect arm movements of their fetuses, and that positive and negative emotions have the opposite effects on fetus movement.

The Role of Gender and Sensation Seeking in Film Choice

This study demonstrates the significance of individual difference factors, particularly gender and sensation seeking, in predicting media choice (examined through hypothetical descriptions of films that participants anticipated they would view). This study used a 2 (Positive mood/negative mood) × 2 (High arousal/low arousal) within-subject design with 544 undergraduate students recruited from a large northeastern university in the United States. Results showed that happy films and high arousal films were preferred over sad films and low-arousal films, respectively. In terms of gender differences, female viewers reported a greater preference than male viewers for happy-mood films. Also, male viewers reported a greater preference for high-arousal films compared to female viewers, and female viewers reported a greater preference for low-arousal films compared to male viewers. Finally, high sensation seekers reported a preference for high-arousal films. Implications for research design and importance of exploring media characteristics are discussed.

Emotional reactivity and emotion recognition in frontotemporal lobar degeneration

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is associated with a profound decline in social and emotional behavior; however, current understanding regarding the specific aspects of emotional functioning that are preserved and disrupted is limited. To assess preservation of function and deficits in two aspects of emotional processing (emotional reactivity and emotion recognition) in FTLD. Twenty-eight FTLD patients were compared with 16 controls in emotional reactivity (self-reported emotional experience, emotional facial behavior, and autonomic nervous system response to film stimuli) and emotion recognition (ability to identify a target emotion of fear, happy, or sad experienced by film characters). Additionally, the neural correlates of emotional reactivity and emotion recognition were investigated. FTLD patients were comparable to controls in 1) emotional reactivity to the fear, happy, and sad film clips and 2) emotion recognition for the happy film clip. However, FTLD patients were significantly impaired compared with controls in emotion recognition for the fear and sad film clips. Volumetric analyses revealed that deficits in emotion recognition were associated with decreased lobar volumes in the frontal and temporal lobes. The socioemotional decline typically seen in frontotemporal lobar degeneration patients may result more from an inability to process certain emotions in other people than from deficits in emotional reactivity.

An Interview with Liliane Targownik

Directed and scripted by Liliane Targownik, Rosenzweig's Freedom (Germany: Sudwestfunk, 1998) is a critically acclaimed German film concerning the wave of neo-Nazi attacks on foreign guest workers and asylum seekers in the years immediately following German reunification. It was broadcast on ARD, Germany's largest television network, in 1999. It won the Discovery Award from the Hollywood Film Festival Award and the German Unions' (DAG) Gold Prize for the best television movie Amidst a backdrop of news footage from real incidents in that turbulent period, Targownik tells the story of two sons of Holocaust survivors living in Germany. Michael Rosenzweig, a laborer engaged to a Vietnamese woman, randomly fires shots at a rampaging mob of skinheads when they attack and set fire to the refugee shelter where his fiancee lives. That night a prominent neo-Nazi leader is assassinated in the same neighborhood. The bullets in his body are traced to Michael's gun. Michael's brother Jacob reluctantly becomes his brother's lawyer when he suspects that the court-appointed public defender Ahrendt has the wrong strategy. Jacob tracks down a homeless man who witnessed a skinhead pick up Michael's gun after he tossed it away. Although Michael is cleared of homicide and marries, skinheads burn down his parents' apartment. Targownik admittedly looks at German events from a Jewish perspective. While she plans to return to Germany to make other films, she resides in Israel, where she completed her Masters degree in Jewish Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Rosenzweig's Freedom is distributed in the United States by the National Center for Jewish Film, ncjf@brandeis.edu. LB: You were raised in Germany. When you were growing up, what films about Jewish life or the Holocaust had an impact on you? LT: I do not remember having seen a film about Jewish life or the Holocaust made by a German filmmaker when I was young. I think the first one I ever saw was The Sound of Music. I was about six years old and remember a nice and happy film that suddenly switched to the scene when the family has to flee across the mountains to evade being captured by the Nazis. It was very scary. The first film about Jewish life that I saw was Hester Street by Joan Micklin-Silver. I remember seeing it in Munich with my family and other people from the Jewish community. Everybody was very moved and proud that there was a film about us. There were only 5,000 Jews in Munich out of a total population of 1.5 million. Everyone knew each other. I was confronted with the issue of the Holocaust through books rather than films. My parents gave me The Diary of Anne Frank and the books of Leon Uris. I saw the movie versions of The Diary and Exodus after I had read the books. I saw a stage production of Fiddler on the Roof before I watched the film. LB: I noticed that one of your first films was about Aktionsuhnenzeichen, a group of young Germans who undertake various projects to help the victims of Nazi Germany. What attracted you to this topic? LT: This documentary was my first work for Israeli TV. I did not speak Hebrew yet, but the head of the program Mabat Sheni, Michael Karpin, wanted me to do a film on this topic. I filmed young Germans working in Israel, trying to cope with the German past by helping Jews and Arabs there. LB: You are now studying in Israel. Have you made Aliyah or do you plan to return to Germany to make films about Jewish subjects? LT: I made Aliyah years ago. I make films both in Germany and Israel. This is a small world, you know. Of course, Rosenzweig's Freedom was shot and produced in Germany. I am now planning a feature film called H.O.M.E. that will be set in Jerusalem in 2000. It will be done in English. I am also planning a documentary in Israel. The next script I will write is on a German-Jewish subject, and I have been invited to teach a seminar at the Munich Film School where I got my education in cinema. …

Reduced emotional response of schizophrenic patients in remission during social interaction

Inappropriate emotional response during social interaction is a prominent feature of schizophrenia during the acute stage of illness. This study evaluates the course of reduced facial activity in schizophrenic patients in remission and compares it with healthy controls. The experimental conditions included watching two films, one inducing happy and the other sad emotional states. Each is followed by an interview eliciting happy and sad feelings. The facial actions were recorded (1) by a computer-based analysis of recordings of the skin movement and (2) by electromyography of the corrugator and zygomaticus muscles. Twenty schizophrenic patients in remission and 20 normal controls participated in the study. In contrast to previously studied acute patients, there was no overall reduction of facial expression in the upper face of schizophrenic patients in remission. Patients showed fewer movements (automatic analysis) of the lower face during the happy interview and more movements during the sad interview compared with controls. Furthermore, schizophrenic patients showed reduced zygomaticus activity (EMG) during both the happy film and the interview, suggesting a reduced ability of schizophrenic patients to express happy facial expressions, such as smiling, in the lower face. This may indicate a reduced variability in emotional response in schizophrenia.