Spontaneous Emotional Expressions Research Articles

Guiding student learning in video lectures: Effects of instructors’ emotional expressions and visual cues

In video lectures, instructors often use spontaneous emotional expressions (facial expressions, tone of voice) and visual cues (underlining, circling) to guide students' attention toward key instructional information. While previous research has confirmed the benefits of visual cues in guiding attention and processing specific information, there's a notable gap in understanding the role of emotional expression in this context. Moreover, there is a lack of comprehensive exploration regarding the specific design of both behaviors (whether they emphasize the same instructional information) and their effect on students. This study conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 first confirmed the guiding effect of an instructor's emotional expression on students, establishing the foundation for our research. Additionally, Experiment 1 explored the impact of the consistency/inconsistency of facial expressions and tone of voice, including student motivation, cognitive load, and learning performance. Results revealed the benefits of consistent positive emotional expressions on motivation and transfer performance, and the benefits of consistent negative emotional expressions on retention performance. Furthermore, we found that tone of voice was a key factor in guiding students, while facial expressions were associated with students' immediate memory. Building upon Experiment 1, Experiment 2 introduced visual cues to investigate the combined impact of these two guiding behaviors on students. Results regarding emotional expressions were replicated, confirming the positive effects of both. Moreover, we found that the irrelevance of visual cues weakened the guiding influence of emotional expression on students, leading to the loss of relevant information. Therefore, we suggest encouraging instructors to convey positive emotions to enhance the learning experience while emphasizing key information through negative emotional expressions accompanied by visual cues. Additionally, minimizing or concealing visual cues whenever possible is advisable when delivering content beyond visual representations.

Facial mimicry and metacognitive judgments in emotion recognition are distinctly modulated by social anxiety and autistic traits

Facial mimicry as well as the accurate assessment of one's performance when judging others’ emotional expressions have been suggested to inform successful emotion recognition. Differences in the integration of these two information sources might explain alterations in the perception of others’ emotions in individuals with Social Anxiety Disorder and individuals on the autism spectrum. Using a non-clinical sample (N = 57), we examined the role of social anxiety and autistic traits in the link between facial mimicry, or confidence in one’s performance, and emotion recognition. While participants were presented with videos of spontaneous emotional facial expressions, we measured their facial muscle activity, asked them to label the expressions and indicate their confidence in accurately labelling the expressions. Our results showed that confidence in emotion recognition was lower with higher social anxiety traits even though actual recognition was not related to social anxiety traits. Higher autistic traits, in contrast, were associated with worse recognition, and a weakened link between facial mimicry and performance. Consequently, high social anxiety traits might not affect emotion recognition itself, but the top-down evaluation of own abilities in emotion recognition contexts. High autistic traits, in contrast, may be related to lower integration of sensorimotor simulations, which promote emotion recognition.

Seeing through the shades of situated affectivity. Sunglasses as a socio-affective artifact

ABSTRACT Debates on situated affectivity have mainly focused on tools that exert some positive influence on affective experience. Far less attention has been paid to artifacts that interact with the expression of affect, or to those that exert some negative influence. To shed light on that shadowy corner of our affective social lives, I describe the workings of an atypical socio-affective artifact, namely, sunglasses. Drawing on insights from psychology and other social sciences, I construe sunglasses as a social shield that helps us block spontaneous emotional expressions, as well as affecting other social processes that heavily depend on the eye region: gaze direction detection, identity recognition, and the sense of intimacy afforded by eye contact.

Individual differences in spontaneous facial expressions in people with visual impairment and blindness

People can visualize their spontaneous and voluntary emotions via facial expressions, which play a critical role in social interactions. However, less is known about mechanisms of spontaneous emotion expressions, especially in adults with visual impairment and blindness. Nineteen adults with visual impairment and blindness participated in interviews where the spontaneous facial expressions were observed and analyzed via the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). We found a set of Action Units, primarily engaged in expressing the spontaneous emotions, which were likely to be affected by participants’ different characteristics. The results of this study could serve as evidence to suggest that adults with visual impairment and blindness show individual differences in spontaneous facial expressions of emotions.

Winners and losers: Recognition of spontaneous emotional expressions increases across childhood

Research using posed emotional expressions is problematic because they lack ecological validity. Adults’ recognition of spontaneous real-world expressions may require the inclusion of postural information. Whether posture improves children’s recognition of real-world expressions was unknown. Younger children (n = 30; 5- to 7-year-olds), older children (n = 30; 8- to 10-year-olds), and adults (n = 30) judged whether tennis players had won or lost a point. Images showed one of three cue types: Head-only, Body-only, or Head–Body expressions. Recognition of expressions improved with age; older children and adults performed better than younger children. In addition, recognition of Body-only and Head–Body cues was better than Head-only cues for all ages. Spontaneous expression recognition improved throughout childhood and with the inclusion of postural information.

From Personal Threat to Cross-Cultural Learning: an Eidetic Investigation

Abstract This study was an eidetic, phenomenological investigation of cross-cultural learning that involves overcoming an experience of personal threat. The study and its findings were placed within the context of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology and the extant humanistic literature on cross-cultural encounter. This appeared especially appropriate given phenomenology’s history “within the movement of the so-called ‘Third Force’ psychology” (Giorgi, 1970, p. xi). The eidetic reduction revealed the phenomenon to be rooted in an essential unfamiliarity with the other compounded by presumptions of the other as representing a substandard foreignness harboring danger. For the phenomenon to unfold required the learner to witness spontaneous emotional expression and empathically discover that the other struggles and suffers “like any other human being.” Openness to the other progressively builds and new meanings emerge from the interpersonal exchange as compartmentalized, intellectualized understandings of the other are outmoded.

Gendered symbols and habitus in collective action: Street protests in Taiwan, 1997–2006

ABSTRACTStudies on women in social movements have shown that women and men use different tactical preferences in protests. However, these are not limited to choice regarding preferential gendered symbols and artifacts; they can also be spontaneous corporeal and emotional expressions depending on contingencies of interaction during protests. To analyze the gender impact and differences in protest tactics, this study focuses on the symbols and artifacts used in protests and the gendered habitus that includes embodied behavior and emotions of protesters in varied situations. This paper examines street protests in Taiwan using audiovisual data collected from television news broadcasting between 1997 and 2006, to compare protest actions undertaken by men with those where women participants comprised the majority. This showed that gendered symbols and artifacts presented in street actions were less confrontational if they were planned beforehand. However, the embodied gender culture as habitus becomes more relevant during disruptive and high-conflict protest events. This study reveals that kneeling as a female posture was effective for avoiding conflict and gaining negotiation opportunities with authorities.

How Well Can We Assess Our Ability to Understand Others' Feelings? Beliefs About Taking Others' Perspectives and Actual Understanding of Others' Emotions.

People vary in their beliefs about their tendency to engage in perspective taking and to understand other’s feelings. Often, however, those beliefs are suggested to be poor indicators of actual skills and thus provide an inaccurate reflection of performance. Few studies, however, have examined whether people’s beliefs accurately predict their performance on emotion recognition tasks using dynamic or spontaneous emotional expressions. We report six studies (N ranges from 186 to 315; Ntotal = 1,347) testing whether individuals’ report of their engagement in perspective taking, as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983), is associated with accurate emotion recognition. In Studies 1–3, emotion recognition performance was assessed using three standard tests of nonverbal emotion recognition. To provide a more naturalistic test, we then assessed performance with a new emotion recognition test in Studies 4–6, using videos of real targets that share their emotional experiences. Participants’ multi-scalar ratings of the targets’ emotions were compared with the targets’ own emotion ratings. Across all studies, we found a modest, yet significant positive relationship: people who believe that they take the other’s perspective also perform better in tests of emotion recognition (r = 0.20, p < 0.001). Beliefs about taking others’ perspective thus reflect interpersonal reality, but only partially.

Emotion in the wilds of nature: The coherence and contagion of fear during threatening group-based outdoors experiences.

Emotional expressions communicate information about the individual's internal state and evoke responses in others that enable coordinated action. The current work investigated the informative and evocative properties of fear vocalizations in a sample of youth from underserved communities and military veterans while white-water rafting. Video-taped footage of participants rafting through white-water rapids was coded for vocal and facial expressions of fear, amusement, pride, and awe, yielding more than 1,300 coded expressions, which were then related to measures of subjective emotion and cortisol response. Consistent with informative properties of emotional expressions, fear vocalizations were positively and significantly related to facial expressions of fear, subjective reports of fear, and individuals' cortisol levels measured after the rafting trip. It is important to note that this coherent pattern was unique to fear vocalizations; vocalizations of amusement, pride, and awe were not significantly related to fear expressions in the face, subjective reports of fear, or cortisol levels. Demonstrating the evocative properties of emotional expression, fear vocalizations of individuals appeared to evoke fear vocalizations in other people in their raft, and cortisol levels of individuals within rafts similarly converged at the end of the trip. We discuss how the study of spontaneous emotion expressions in naturalistic settings can help address basic yet controversial questions about emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record

The wisdom of the body: Listeners' autonomic arousal distinguishes between spontaneous and posed vocal emotions.

It has been the matter of much debate whether perceivers are able to distinguish spontaneous vocal expressions of emotion from posed vocal expressions (e.g., emotion portrayals). In this experiment, we show that such discrimination can be manifested in the autonomic arousal of listeners during implicit processing of vocal emotions. Participants (N = 21, age: 20-55 years) listened to two consecutive blocks of brief voice clips and judged the gender of the speaker in each clip, while we recorded three measures of sympathetic arousal of the autonomic nervous system (skin conductance level, mean arterial blood pressure, pulse rate). Unbeknownst to the listeners, the blocks consisted of two types of emotional speech: spontaneous and posed clips. As predicted, spontaneous clips yielded higher arousal levels than posed clips, suggesting that listeners implicitly distinguished between the two kinds of expression, even in the absence of any requirement to retrieve emotional information from the voice. We discuss the results with regard to theories of emotional contagion and the use of posed stimuli in studies of emotions.

Continuous Estimation of Emotions in Speech by Dynamic Cooperative Speaker Models

Research on automatic emotion recognition from speech has recently focused on the prediction of time-continuous dimensions (e.g., arousal and valence) of spontaneous and realistic expressions of emotion, as found in real-life interactions. However, the automatic prediction of such emotions poses several challenges, such as the subjectivity found in the definition of a gold-standard from a pool of raters and the issue of data scarcity in training models. In this work, we introduce a novel emotion recognition system, based on ensembles of single-speaker-regression-models. The estimation of emotion is provided by combining a subset of the initial pool of single-speaker-regression-models selecting those that are most concordant among them. The proposed approach allows the addition or removal of speakers from the ensemble without the necessity to re-build the entire recognition system. The simplicity of this aggregation strategy, coupled with the flexibility assured by the modular architecture, and the promising results observed on the RECOLA database highlight the potential implications of the proposed method in a real-life scenario and in particular in web-based applications.

Recognizing spontaneous facial expressions of emotion in a small-scale society of Papua New Guinea.

We report 2 studies on how residents of Papua New Guinea interpret facial expressions produced spontaneously by other residents of Papua New Guinea. Members of a small-scale indigenous society, Trobrianders (Milne Bay Province; N = 32, 14 to 17 years) were shown 5 facial expressions spontaneously produced by members of another small-scale indigenous society, Fore (Eastern Highlands Province) that Ekman had photographed, labeled, and published in The Face of Man (1980), each as an expression of a basic emotion: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, and disgust. Trobrianders were asked to use any word they wanted to describe how each person shown felt and to provide valence and arousal ratings. Other Trobrianders (N = 24, 12 to 14 years) were shown the same photographs but asked to choose their response from a short list. In both studies, agreement with Ekman's predicted labels was low: 0% to 16% and 13% to 38% of observers, respectively. (PsycINFO Database Record

On the relationship of emotional abilities and prosocial behavior

The ability to perceive and infer the meaning of facial expressions has been considered a critical component of emotional intelligence being essential for successful social functioning: Longitudinal findings suggest that the ability to recognize emotion cues is related to positive social interactions. Moreover, pronounced recognition abilities for at least some emotions facilitate prosocial behavior in everyday situations. Integrating paradigms from behavioral economics and psychometrics, we used an interdisciplinary approach to study the relationship between prosociality as trait cooperativeness and the ability to recognize emotions in others. We measured emotion recognition accuracy (ERA) using a multivariate test battery. We captured prosocial behavior in standard socio-economic games, along with spontaneous emotion expressions. Structural equation modeling revealed no significant relationship between overall ERA and prosocial behavior. However, modeling emotion-specific factors suggested that more prosocial individuals are better in recognizing fear and tend to express more spontaneous emotions during the prisoner's dilemma. In all, cooperative individuals seem to be more sensitive to the distress of others and more expressive, possibly fostering reciprocal interactions with like-minded others.

Intact Rapid Facial Mimicry as well as Generally Reduced Mimic Responses in Stable Schizophrenia Patients.

Spontaneous emotional expressions (rapid facial mimicry) perform both emotional and social functions. In the current study, we sought to test whether there were deficits in automatic mimic responses to emotional facial expressions in patients (15 of them) with stable schizophrenia compared to 15 controls. In a perception-action interference paradigm (the Simon task; first experiment), and in the context of a dual-task paradigm (second experiment), the task-relevant stimulus feature was the gender of a face, which, however, displayed a smiling or frowning expression (task-irrelevant stimulus feature). We measured the electromyographical activity in the corrugator supercilii and zygomaticus major muscle regions in response to either compatible or incompatible stimuli (i.e., when the required response did or did not correspond to the depicted facial expression). The compatibility effect based on interactions between the implicit processing of a task-irrelevant emotional facial expression and the conscious production of an emotional facial expression did not differ between the groups. In stable patients (in spite of a reduced mimic reaction), we observed an intact capacity to respond spontaneously to facial emotional stimuli.

Children's expressions of positive emotion are sustained by smiling, touching, and playing with parents and siblings: A naturalistic observational study of family life.

Research on family socialization of positive emotion has primarily focused on the infant and toddler stages of development, and relied on observations of parent-child interactions in highly structured laboratory environments. Little is known about how children's spontaneous expressions of positive emotion are maintained in the uncontrolled settings of daily life, particularly within the family and during the school-age years. This naturalistic observational study examines 3 family behaviors-mutual display of positive emotion, touch, and joint leisure-that surround 8- to 12-year-old children's spontaneous expressions of positive emotion, and tests whether these behaviors help to sustain children's expressions. Recordings taken of 31 families in their homes and communities over 2 days were screened for moments when children spontaneously expressed positive emotion in the presence of at least 1 parent. Children were more likely to sustain their expressions of positive emotion when mothers, fathers, or siblings showed positive emotion, touched, or participated in a leisure activity. There were few differences in the ways that mothers and fathers socialized their sons' and daughters' positive emotion expressions. This study takes a unique, ecologically valid approach to assess how family members connect to children's expressions of positive emotion in middle childhood. Future observational studies should continue to explore mechanisms of family socialization of positive emotion, in laboratory and naturalistic settings. (PsycINFO Database Record

The feeling rules of victim offender mediation

This paper is based on an ethnographic study conducted in Sweden and focuses on the emotional aspect, both its rhetoric and interaction, of the victim offender mediation process. The emotion culture is examined, as well as the basic feeling rules that tell victims and offenders how to feel, value, and manage their own, and the other party's feelings in the mediation process. If mediation is done 'with your heart', then mediation is also the practice of managing hearts. The practice of mediation is influenced by both a victim discourse and an impartiality discourse, which encourages participant control of emotions but also support spontaneous emotional expressions as a natural part of the remedial ritual.

Multimodal emotional state recognition using sequence-dependent deep hierarchical features

Emotional state recognition has become an important topic for human–robot interaction in the past years. By determining emotion expressions, robots can identify important variables of human behavior and use these to communicate in a more human-like fashion and thereby extend the interaction possibilities. Human emotions are multimodal and spontaneous, which makes them hard to be recognized by robots. Each modality has its own restrictions and constraints which, together with the non-structured behavior of spontaneous expressions, create several difficulties for the approaches present in the literature, which are based on several explicit feature extraction techniques and manual modality fusion. Our model uses a hierarchical feature representation to deal with spontaneous emotions, and learns how to integrate multiple modalities for non-verbal emotion recognition, making it suitable to be used in an HRI scenario. Our experiments show that a significant improvement of recognition accuracy is achieved when we use hierarchical features and multimodal information, and our model improves the accuracy of state-of-the-art approaches from 82.5% reported in the literature to 91.3% for a benchmark dataset on spontaneous emotion expressions.

Children's spontaneous emotional expressions while receiving (un)wanted prizes in the presence of peers.

Although current emotion theories emphasize the importance of contextual factors for emotional expressive behavior, developmental studies that examine such factors are currently thin on the ground. In this research, we studied the course of emotional expressions of 8- and 11-year-old children after winning a (large) first prize or a (substantially smaller) consolation prize, while playing a game competing against the computer or a physically co-present peer. We analyzed their emotional reactions by conducting two perception tests in which participants rated children’s level of happiness. Results showed that co-presence positively affected children’s happiness only when receiving the first prize. Moreover, for children who were in the presence of a peer, we found that eye contact affected children’s expressions of happiness, but that the effect was different for different age groups: 8-year-old children were negatively affected, and 11-year-old children positively. Overall, we can conclude that as children grow older and their social awareness increases, the presence of a peer affects their non-verbal expressions, regardless of their appreciation of their prize.

Double-powered free gracilis muscle transfer for smile reanimation: A longitudinal optoelectronic study

The choice of the motor donor nerve is a crucial point in free flap transfer algorithms. In the case of unilateral facial paralysis, the contralateral healthy facial nerve can provide coordinated smile animation and spontaneous emotional expression, but with unpredictable axonal ingrowth into the recipient muscle. Otherwise, the masseteric nerve ipsilateral to the paralysis can provide a powerful neural input, without a spontaneous trigger of the smile. Harvesting a bulky muscular free flap may enhance the quantity of contraction but esthetic results are unpleasant. Therefore, the logical solution for obtaining high amplitude of smiling combined with spontaneity of movement is to couple the neural input: the contralateral facial nerve plus the ipsilateral masseteric nerve. Thirteen patients with unilateral dense facial paralysis underwent a one-stage facial reanimation with a gracilis flap powered by a double donor neural input, provided by both the ipsilateral masseteric nerve (coaptation by an end-to-end neurorrhaphy with the obturator nerve) and the contralateral facial nerve (coaptation through a cross-face nerve graft: end-to-end neurorrhaphy on the healthy side and end-to-side neurorrhaphy on the obturator nerve, distal to the masseteric/obturator neurorrhaphy). Their facial movements were evaluated with an optoelectronic motion analyzer. Before surgery, on average, the paretic side exhibited a smaller total three-dimensional mobility than the healthy side, with a 52% activation ratio and >30% of asymmetry. After surgery, the differences significantly decreased (analysis of variance (ANOVA), p<0.05), with an activation ratio between 75% (maximum smile) and 91% (maximum smile with teeth clenching), and <20% of asymmetry. Similar modifications were seen for the performance of spontaneous smiles. The significant presurgical asymmetry of labial movements reduced after surgery. The use of a double donor neural input permitted both movements that were similar in force to that of the healthy side, and spontaneous movements elicited by emotional triggering.

Effect of Acting Experience on Emotion Expression and Recognition in Voice: Non-Actors Provide Better Stimuli than Expected.

Both in the performative arts and in emotion research, professional actors are assumed to be capable of delivering emotions comparable to spontaneous emotional expressions. This study examines the effects of acting training on vocal emotion depiction and recognition. We predicted that professional actors express emotions in a more realistic fashion than non-professional actors. However, professional acting training may lead to a particular speech pattern; this might account for vocal expressions by actors that are less comparable to authentic samples than the ones by non-professional actors. We compared 80 emotional speech tokens from radio interviews with 80 re-enactments by professional and inexperienced actors, respectively. We analyzed recognition accuracies for emotion and authenticity ratings and compared the acoustic structure of the speech tokens. Both play-acted conditions yielded similar recognition accuracies and possessed more variable pitch contours than the spontaneous recordings. However, professional actors exhibited signs of different articulation patterns compared to non-trained speakers. Our results indicate that for emotion research, emotional expressions by professional actors are not better suited than those from non-actors.