CHAPTER FIVE

In this first section of the textbook we have asked what emotions are and why
people experience them. In addressing the second question, we considered distal
evolutionary and cultural perspectives on the broad functions emotions are
thought to serve, in terms of supporting human evolutionary fitness and social
structure. We also examined how our interpretation of a situation determines
emotion. In the final chapter of this section, we consider how people express emo-
tions nonverbally, through facial expressions, posture, and voice.
Appraisal theories of emotion focus on processes happening within an in-
dividual. In appraisal, we ask what implications some situation has for our goals
and well-being. Although appraisals are about the relationship between the
person and the environment, the appraisal-to-emotion process happens inside
the person. In contrast, the expression of emotion is inherently social. Charles
Darwin (1872/1998) proposed that some aspects of expressions may reflect be-
havioral strategies for self-protection. For example, sticking out your tongue in
a disgust expression serves to remove something offensive that you may have put
into your mouth. When you widen your eyes in a fear expression, you improve
your ability to see a source of danger (D. H. Lee, Mirza, Flanagan, & Anderson,
2014). However, the primary function of emotional expression is to communicate
our inner states and intentions to others.
The inherent sociality of emotional expression creates interesting complexi-
ties. We must distinguish between the expression of emotion and people's ability
to interpret these expressions. Also, people can exert control over their expressions
for social purposes, concealing some emotions and faking others. These are inter-
esting processes in their own right, and they must be considered in interpreting
any research on expression.

119
 Research on facial expressions also offers a rich example of issues that arise
in emotion science more generally. Many big arguments in the field were raised
first, and are still debated most contentiously, in the context of facial expressions.
To what extent are people's facial expressions part of human nature, and to what
extent are they shaped by cultural learning? How much agreement must there be
across cultures to declare that some aspect of emotion is universal? What meth-
ods are appropriate for deciding whether emotions exist as a limited number of
discrete categories versus a series of continuous, intersecting dimensions? If they
fall into a limited number of discrete categories, what is that number? How do
emotional expressions relate to emotional feelings?
The three modern theories of emotion described in Chapter 1 lead to dis-
tinct hypotheses about expression. According to basic emotions theory, human
nature provides a template for the expression of each emotion. Although cul-
ture may tinker with the templates or make up new gestures and culture-specific
expressions, and individuals may conceal or fake expressions intentionally, the
automatic expression of each emotion should be displayed and recognized in a
similar form all over the world (Ekman, 1992). According to the component pro-
cess model, human nature does provide a "code" for emotional expression, but
rather than emotion categories, it codes for more specific aspects of emotional
appraisal, such as novelty, unexpectedness, pleasantness, and control (Scherer,
1992; see Figure 1.7 to review this approach). According to psychological con-
struction theories, facial expressions are likely to communicate the valence of
emotion reliably across cultures and perhaps people's arousal or activation levels
as well. However, other aspects of emotional expression are much more likely
to be learned from the social environment and may vary widely from person to
person and situation to situation (Barrett, 2006). Facial expressions provided the
first battleground on which these theories competed for evidence, and there's still
no sign of a clear winner.
Early studies of emotional expression are the reason emotion is now a re-
spected and important topic within psychology, and the findings of these studies
shaped the direction of future research in profound ways. We could even claim
that these studies are the reason you're reading this textbook. The history behind
this assertion deserves some attention. Read on and see for yourself.

HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF
FACIAL EXPRESSION RESEARCH
Research on emotional expression began with Darwin's (1872/1998) studies of
facial and postural expressions, soon after he developed his theory of evolution.
Darwin's observations, although neglected by psychology for several decades, went
on to powerfully influence the questions asked and hypotheses eventually posed by
pioneering researchers in emotion.

120 EMOTION
Figure 5.1.
Nonhuman primates have some facial expressions t hat clearly resemble those of humans, and they display
them in similar situations.

Over the course of Darwin's travels on the H. M. S. Beagle, as well as in his

daily life at home in England, he noted similarities in the physical behaviors exhib-
ited by animals of many species when they were threatened, angry, sad, or excited.
For example, many species react to a threat by changing their posture to appear
larger. Birds raise their feathers and spread their wings, cats arch their backs and
their hair stands on end, and primates stand on their hind legs and lift their arms.
Darwin also noted that some of the most common human expressions of emotion
resemble those of monkeys, chimpanzees, and apes (Figure 5.1).
In The Expression ofthe Emotions in Man and Animals) Darwin ( 1872/ 1998)
provided detailed evidence for these similarities and argued that expressions of
emotion probably evolved because they conferred some kind of survival or repro-
ductive advantage on individuals who displayed them. For instance, animals that
react to threats by making themselves look larger increase their chance of survival,
because the change in appearance might scare off an attacker. In much of the book,
Darwin argues that human expressions of emotion are also the result of evolution-
ary processes that link us to our closest primate relatives.
Darwin recognized that if facial expressions were inherited from primate an-
cestors, they should be the same in all human cultures. In his era, the mid 1800s,
photography was awkward and expensive, so to test his hypothesis he had to rely
on written reports from missionaries and others who had traveled to other con-
tinents. Darwin wrote to anyone he knew of living in another part of the world,
described typical facial expressions of particular emotions, and asked his corre-
spondents whether natives ofthat culture expressed each emotion in the same way.
Darwin's correspondents replied that people throughout the world did show
similar expressions of many feelings. When they were surprised or astonished, his
correspondents agreed, they open their eyes widely and sometimes their mouths
as well. When puzzled or perplexed, they frown. When determined, they frown
and close their mouths tightly. When they feel helpless, they shrug their shoulders.
Even some people who were born deaf or blind show the same expressions. When

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 121

 embarrassed, people use their hands to cover their faces. People throughout the
world also pout, although mostly in childhood.
In this way, Darwin documented intriguing similarities in the nonverbal
gestures and expressions people were seen to display around the world. His ideas
influenced some early psychologists, including William James, whose theory of
emotion also reflects the assumption that emotions are innate responses inher-
ited from our ancestors. Before long, however, some problems with Darwin's re-
search strategy were noted. First, consider the nature of the questions he asked
his far-flung assistants. The question was not "Can you describe the way people's
faces look when they are astonished?". A typical question read more like this: "Is
astonishment expressed by the eyes and mouth being opened wide, and by the
eyebrows being raised?" Darwin's correspondents simply said yes or no. People
sometimes agree with a description such as this even if the description is not
accurate or if they are not sure, especially when it is clear what hypothesis the
researcher is testing. Today, well-trained researchers would avoid such a sugges-
tive question and let the correspondents describe expressions in their own words.
Alternatively, they might offer a series ofchoices without implying that one is the
correct answer. Another problem is that Darwin's question required that his cor-
respondents infer people's emotions by some other means than facial expressions,
and it's not clear how they did so.
By the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth,
social scientists were traveling throughout the world to study the lives and customs
of people in different cultures. Their observations included comments about the
local people's behavior in emotional situations, often emphasizing differences from
typical behavior in the West. For example, Lafcadio Hearn ( 1894/2011) described
a Japanese woman who laughed when showing her employer her recently deceased
husband's ashes. Otto Klineberg (1938) analyzed descriptions of emotional expres-
sion in Chinese literature, noting puzzling differences as well as similarities. Charac-
ters would be described as clapping their hands when they were angry, whereas in the
West we think of this gesture as a sign of happiness or excitement, or as scratching
their ears and cheeks when they are happy. As discussed in Chapter 3, ethnographic
reports of cultural differences in emotional language and behavior, as well as expres-
sion, were also pouring in from around the globe. By the middle of the twentieth
century, it was widely accepted in the social sciences that emotion and its expression
were largely the product of cultural learning (Birdwhistell, 1970; Klineberg, 1940).
In the 1960s, however, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins began to ask
whether Darwin might have been right after all, despite his discredited methods.
Tomkins had examined thousands of photographs of people's emotional expres-
sions, some in naturalistic settings and others posed by actors. He found that for
some emotions, many of the expressions had a common set of elements, defining
a prototypical expression for each emotion. When participants in the United
States were shown photographs of expressions closely resembling this prototype,

122 EMOTION
they tended to agree strongly as to what emotion was being portrayed (Tomkins,
1962). However, Tomkins knew this was not great evidence for the argument
that emotional expressions are part of universal human nature-his participants
could simply have learned the same cultural code for displaying emotions as the
actors in the photos, just as they all learned the English language as children.
At this point, Tomkins pulled a sneaky move (Ekman, 1999). He was men-
toring two young researchers, Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard, each of whom was
interested in emotion. To each researcher, Tomkins suggested that the way to find
out whether emotional expressions were determined by human nature or cultural
learning was to go to people in a variety of cultures-preferably with little or no
exposure to Westerners-and ask them to interpret the meaning ofthese prototyp-
ical expressions. The sneaky part is that Tomkins did not tell either Ekman or Izard
that he was giving the same advice to the other researcher as well. As a result, each
researcher went off to do the study in question, having no idea that the other was
doing the same thing.
From a scientific standpoint, Tomkins's move made sense. He knew that
if the results supported his hypotheses about universality, they would be highly
controversial; having two independent researchers do the same study, and report
the same findings, makes for far more convincing evidence than one study alone.
We don't recommend this as a general strategy for winning friends, but Tomkins's
trick paid off. Izard selected for his studies those photographed expressions that
were most consistently identified as expressing the target emotions by people in the
United States and went on to show that these were also recognized at remarkably
high rates in a variety of other Western and non-Western societies (Izard, 1971).
Ekman took the point even further, traveling with colleagues Richard Sorenson
and Wallace Friesen and a translator to New Guinea, where they had access to par-
ticipants in small, isolated villages who had previously had little or no contact with
people from the West (Sorenson, 1975).
For the study, Ekman had chosen photographs from Tomkins's files that
closely matched the prototype expressions, as described with a new system for
coding facial muscle movements, called the Facial Action Coding System or
FACS (Ekman & Friesen, 1978). Figure 5.2 shows many of the muscles under-
lying the facial skin; the FACS system assigns an action unit to the change in
appearance created by moving each muscle. Because the language was so differ-
ent and because the participants were extremely uncomfortable with being asked
direct questions such as "What emotion is this person expressing?" (Sorenson,
1975), Ekman and colleagues developed an alternative method for linking facial
expressions to emotions-they told short stories about situations that would be
expected to elicit that emotion (e.g., someone in the village has stolen your pig)
and asked participants which of two or three photographed facial expressions was
most appropriate for each situation. This way, all the participants had to do was
point to the chosen picture.

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 123

 This study has many limitations that
have been analyzed extensively (Russell,
1994). The stories were told by a trans-
lator, and the researchers had no idea
what the translator was saying. For all
they knew, the translator might have said,
Liz. palptbrak metfjaJe
"Hey, these guys want you to point to the
photo on the left; just do it." To the re-
A"Cr/:r""==::::::::!
QUll·
Infra- -
searchers' knowledge, however, the trans-
drabz.s orbital
labu Mad lator was being reasonably consistent in
supu. Zyp- - -
ma/i&
ltLad
conveying the stories and did not do any-
thing obvious to give the expected answer
away. Also, this situation bore no rela-
tionship to the participants' typical social
interaction (villages in New Guinea did
not have formal tests or even a practice
of asking direct questions, much less re-
Figure 5.2.
The Facial Action Coding search participation pools for psychology
System assigns a number experiments), and participants appeared
to the change in appearance
extremely nervous (Sorenson, 1975). Also, for each story, participants only had
caused by moving each
muscle in the face two or three photos to choose from; in each case, they may have chosen the closest
(Sobota, 1909). available option even if the real expression was not available.
Despite these limitations, the results were remarkable. Adults chose the
correct pictures at very high rates: 92% for happiness, 84% for anger, 81 %
for disgust, 80% for fear, and 79% for sadness ( Sorenson, 1975). In a related
set of studies, Ekman and colleagues (Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969)
reported that upward of70% of participants in the United States, Brazil, and
Japan chose the intended label for expressions of these same emotions, plus
surprise (chance in these studies was 1 in 6, or about 17%). People in Borneo
also had accuracy rates well above chance. The idea of cross-cultural general-
ity of facial expressions received further support from the research of Irena.us
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who photographed expressions in many remote cultures.
One of his more surprising findings was that people throughout the world
raise their eyebrows as a friendly greeting (Figure 5.3) and that this eyebrow-
raising greeting lasts one-third of a second, from relaxed to raised and back to
relaxed, in every culture (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1973).
Recall that psychologists and anthropologists previously assumed that emo-
tions and their expressions were completely culturally learned. Ekman's, lzard's,
Figure 5.3. and Eibl-Eibesfeldt's findings changed everything. Although intense argument
People throughout the world took place along the way, these findings convinced many within psychology that
greet one another by raising something about emotional expression must be innate and universal, at least for
their eyebrows and sometimes
also slightly opening their some emotions. This made emotion a legitimate topic for psychology research,
mouths. and the field of affective science was born.

124 EMOTION
ARE FACIAL EXPRESSIONS
OF EMOTION UNIVERSAL?
Nearly SO years after Ekman's and Izard's original studies, the claim that there
are six basic emotions with universal facial expressions is now a staple of most
introductory psychology textbooks, and is invoked in academic publications and
magazine articles with comparable frequency. How strong is the evidence for this
claim?
Let's take one common misunderstanding off the table. No one who does
facial expression research claims that there are exactly six basic emotions, no
more, and no less-not even Ekman (1992). These emotions were included in
Ekman's studies because their displays showed high regularity in Tomkins's origi-
nal set ofphotographs. (Izard also included interest as an emotion, although
most other authorities do not.) Somewhere along the way, the correct in-
terpretation, "prototypical displays of these six emotions are recognized at
high frequencies by people around the world;' morphed into a far broader
claim that "the six basic, universal emotions are happiness, fear, anger, sad-
ness, disgust, and surprise." As we saw in Chapter 1, the criteria for calling
some emotions basic include, but are not limited to, having a universal facial _a _ _ __ b
expression. Ekman (1992) has suggested that expressions of several other
emotions may ultimately prove to be universal as well. We will encounter
some examples in later chapters.
Still, it is important to take a critical eye to the first interpretation, the
one emphasizing facial expressions of these six emotions. Let's see where
c d
the evidence stands.

EKMAN'S CROSS-CULTURAL
STUDIES
After his initial studies, Carroll Izard focused his subsequent research on the
development of emotional expression in infants and young children (Izard &
Malatesta, 1987). Ekman, however, continued to focus on gathering evidence -----
e f

for cross-cultural agreement in the interpretation of his six prototype expres-

sions. With the help of colleagues around the world, he gathered data from
participants in more than a dozen countries, including Estonia, Germany,
Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Scotland, Sumatra, and Turkey, as well as
the United States. The basic test differed from the method he had used in 9
New Guinea. Imagine that you are one of the research participants. Someone
Figure 5.4.
shows you one ofthe seven photos in Figure 5.4 (fun fact: that's Paul Ekman in People in many cultures have
Figure S.4f and asks you to decide which emotion is displayed: anger, disgust, been asked to identify which face
goes with each emotion: anger,
fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, or neutral (Ekman & Friesen, 1984). If you
disgust, fear, happiness, sadness,
speak a language other than English, the researchers would first get someone and surprise. (One expression is
to translate those six words into your language. neutral.)

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 125

Figure S.S. 100
Mean accuracies for
pairing the expressions in 90
Figure 5.4 with their
80
emotion labels. Adapted
from data in "Is There a 70
Universal Recognition
of Emotion From Facial 60

Expression?" by J. A. Russell, 50
1994, Psychological Bulletin,
115, 102-141. 40

30

20

10

Happiness Surprise Sadness Fear Disgust Anger

Non-Western Western

Figure 5.5 shows the results, averaged across many studies and almost 2,000
people (Russell, 1994). The light-gray bar represents the percentage of times,
on average, that non-Western observers chose the expected emotion word for
the facial expression of an emotion. The black bar represents the corresponding
statistic for Western participants. Random guessing would produce 1 of 6 or
about 17% correct for each emotion, and clearly results were better than that.
Although the photographs were of people of European ancestry, people from
other societies throughout the world identified most of the expressions cor-
rectly. These findings strongly suggest that most people throughout the world
give similar interpretations to certain facial expressions of emotion. However,
people recognize expressions from their own ethnic group better than those of
outsiders, as we shall discuss in more detail later in this chapter (Elfenbein &
Ambady, 2002).
Like Darwin's original study, the research summarized in Figure 5.5 has lim-
itations. One is that the photos were carefully posed to be strong examples of the
six expressions. With such photos, recognition accuracy tends to be high (Tracy
& Robins, 2008). However, in everyday life we seldom encounter such perfect,
intense expressions. Most expressions are more subtle or show a mixture of emo-
tions, and sometimes people try to hide their emotions. With everyday expres-
sions, our accuracy of identifying emotions is considerably less impressive (Kayval
& Russell, 2013; Naab & Russell, 2007). For example, in one study researchers
asked a first set of participants to view images intended to evoke fear, sadness, dis-
gust, or anger and videotaped their expressions while they were looking; the par-
ticipants also reported which emotion they felt most strongly for each image. The
researchers then showed the videos to a second set ofparticipants and asked them
to guess what emotion the person in the video was feeling. Results were abysmal;

126 EMOTION
chance was 25%, and accuracy rates ranged from a high of 40% for disgust to a
low of 17.5% for fear (Wagner, MacDonald, & Manstead, 1986). A complication
is that the videotaped participants may have been suppressing or concealing their
expressions and/ or they may have had more complex responses to the photos than
a single emotion. Either of these factors would help explain the lower accuracy
rates. Nonetheless, the percentages are far less impressive than those produced
using Ekman's methods.
Another problem is that the matching procedure likely overestimates peo-
ple's accuracy (Russell, 1994). When you look at Figure 5.4, presumably you
identify face (g) as happy. Almost everyone does. Now you are left with five
faces to pair with five labels. Suppose you are unsure whether face (d) represents
surprise or fear. If you decide that face ( e) is a better expression of fear, you
choose (d) for surprise. Suppose you have no idea what to call face (c). If you
identify (a) as anger and (b) as sadness, you label (c) as disgust just by process
of elimination.
One way to get around this limitation is to present photos one at a time and
ask what emotion (if any) each face expresses-this is referred to as free labeling.
The difficulty of this method is that people sometimes give answers that are not
what the researchers expect (Ekman, 1994a). For face (e), the intended answer is
"fear:' Various people call this expression terror, horror, panic, or "she looks like
she just saw a ghost." Presumably we would count all those answers as correct, as
near-synonyms for fear. But what if someone called the expression worry? Is worry
close enough to fear that we should consider it correct?
A similar problem arises with the anger expression: Is the de-
scription "frustrated" right or wrong? Despite these difficulties, re- 100
90
searchers find that people are reasonably accurate at freely labeling
80
facial expressions, even in faces from other cultures, although they 70
can match faces to given labels more accurately and more confi- 60
dently (M. G. Frank & Stennett, 2001). Figure 5.6 shows the accu- 50
40
racy of one group of college students in free labeling the emotions
30
portrayed by six faces (Ekman, 1994b). 20
However, Ekman's procedures in many ways underestimate
people's ability to interpret emotional expressions. In everyday
life, we do not try to read someone's emotion based solely on a
static facial expression. We note facial movement, as well as
posture, eye blinks, trembling, shoulder shrugging, head turns, Figure 5.6.
speed of walking, hand gestures, and direction of gaze (Ambadar, Accuracy of one group of college students in
Schooler, & Cohn, 2005; Bould, Morris, & Wink, 2008; free labeling six emotional expressions. The
students were not given labels to choose from
K. Edwards, 1998; Van den Stock, Righart, & de Gelder, 2007). or any other suggestions about their answers.
People can also assess emotions moderately well from just hearing From data in 'i\11 Emotions are Basic," by P.
someone's tone ofvoice (Adolphs, Damasio, & Tranel, 2002). People Ekman, 1994, in P. Ekman and R. J. Davidson,
editors, The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental
gauge emotions much faster and more accurately if they see and Questions (pp. 15-19), New York, NY: Oxford
hear the person than if they just see or just hear (de Gelder, 2000). University Press.

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 127

 DIRECT GAZE AVERTED GAZE Some people are able to detect fear even from another person's smell
( de Groot, Semin, & Smeets, 2014; Leppanen & Hietanen, 2003;
Zhou & Chen, 2009).
The task in Figure 5.4 is artificial in another way as well. Note that
ANGER
the researchers posed all the faces to look directly at the observer. In real
life, happy people look straight at you, and so do angry people, espe-
cially if they are angry at you. However, sad people almost always gaze
down and to the side (hence the expression looking downcast), and you
FEAR recognize the expression of sadness partly from that head position. In
which direction do frightened people look? They look at whatever is
frightening them. You will seldom see someone with a frightened ex-
Figure 5.7.
pression looking straight at you, unless they are frightened of you (or,
How quickly can you identify these perhaps, something right behind you, in which case you should check
expressions (from Adams & Kleck, 2003)? behind yourself immediately). Although people recognize an angry ex-
Most people identify fearful expressions
more easily when the person is looking pression equally well in a face looking at them versus looking away, most
to the side than when they look straight people identify a fearful expression more easily in a face looking to the
ahead. However, people recognize side, as shown in Figure 5.7 (Adams & Kleck, 2003).
expressions of anger about equally well
regardless of gaze direction.
This makes it more difficult to interpret Ekman's findings. On the
one hand, the accuracy rates for certain expressions are high, all over
the world, and they would likely be even higher if more complete infor-
mation was included (e.g., posture, tone of voice). On the other hand, the task is
artificial in that the expressions Ekman used are more intense and "pure" than most
we see in real life, and participants were allowed to choose from only a few emotion
labels for each expression.
How strong is the evidence for universality? It depends on the claim one is
trying to make. Even considering the studies' many limitations, it is hard to ex-
plain Ekman's results without acknowledging that some aspect of our emotional
expression is innate. If emotional expressions were completely culturally learned,
trying to read the expression of someone in another culture would be like drop-
ping into Saudi Arabia with no knowledge of Arabic and trying to understand
what everyone is saying. Clearly, people identify certain expressions better than
that. This suggests that humans do have some kind of universal decoder ring for
interpreting facial expressions, and it's hard to see how such a decoder would have
evolved if the expressions themselves were not influenced by evolution, at least to
some extent.
However, we must constrain our interpretation in several ways. We have no
way of knowing what the decoder ring says we can't assume it has codes for fear,
anger, and so forth just because those were the states examined in Ekman's studies.
It's possible that something like Scherer's component process model would pro-
duce the same expressions and recognition rates. We also can't assume that every-
one feeling those emotions shows these expressions they clearly don't. Although
these six prototype expressions are recognizable by people around the world in
ideal circumstances, real-life expressions are much murkier and more difficult to

128 EMOTION
interpret. This variability must be caused by a combination of cultural learning
and individual differences in expressivity. So something in this process is universal
and presumably the product of our evolutionary heritage, but it's still hard to be
sure what that is.

HOW MANY EXPRESSIONS ARE THERE?

Even if we agree that some expressions of emotion are universal, how many
are there? On the one hand, a variety of researchers have offered solid evidence
that expressions of additional emotions are recognized at high rates, in some
cases cross-culturally, beyond Ekman's original six. Examples include contempt
(Matsumoto, 1992), embarrassment and amusement (Keltner, 1995), pride (Tracy,
Shariff, Zhao, & Henrich, 2013 ), shame (Haidt & Keltner, 1999), and sexual desire
(Gonzaga, Turner, Keltner, Campos, & Altemus, 2006). People also easily recog-
nize an expression of sleepiness, although we do not regard sleepiness as an emotion.
On the other hand, some have argued that there may be even fewer expressions
than six. Rachel Jack and colleagues (Jack, Garrod, & Schyns, 2014) have devel-
oped a sophisticated computer program that generates
dynamic, simulated facial expressions based on action
Emotion
units in the FACS system. For example, Figure 5.8 AU4
Happy
shows a computer-generated model of an expression
Surprise
combining action units 4 (the eyebrows pull down
Fear . I
and together in a frown), 5 (eyelids raise to open the AUS
eyes more widely), and 20 (the muscles on the sides Disgust

of the chin contract, stretching the lower lip down Anger

and to each side) that plays out over 1.25 seconds. Sad
AU20
Imagine that you are a participant in the study. On
each trial, the computer shows you a short video of a
C)
facial expression based on a random selection of action L o 0.5 1.25 s C>
units, each emerging over one of six time functions
l 0

(e.g., peaking 300 milliseconds into the video versus

650 milliseconds in). Your job is to decide which of
Ekman's six emotion labels happiness, fear, anger,
sadness, disgust, or surprise best fits the expression.
The data were used to develop statistical models 0 0.5 1.25 s
ITTTll 111 IIIITI In f l 1111]II I nIll lTrml
of participants' responses, trying to estimate the pro- Perceptual
cesses by which participants had reached their con- Stimulus Expectations
clusions. In addition to asking which action units
Figure 5.8.
were associated with each emotion in general, Jack Computer-generated dynamic facial expressions, created by
and colleagues (2014) asked when each action unit combining the effects of three randomly selected Facial Action
Coding System units over the course of 1.25 seconds. From
appeared most important whether it had the great-
"Dynamic Facial Expressions of Emotion Transmit an Evolving
est impact on people's ratings when displayed early in Hierarchy of Signals Over Time," by R. E. Jack, 0. G. Garrod, and
the expression or relatively late. They found that four P. G. Schyns, 2014, Current Biology, 24(2), 187-192.

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 129

 action units were most important early on: action units S (upper lid raiser), 9 (nose
wrinkler), 22 (lip funneler), and 27 (mouth stretch). These action units combined
appeared to allow participants to distinguish among four categories: happiness,
sadness, fear/surprise, and anger/disgust. Action units that helped people make
finer-grained distinctions were more important later in the expression.
Does this mean there are only four basic expressions of emotion? Although
the methodology is innovative and the results are intriguing, there are several
reasons for caution. First, the expressions rated by participants were generated at
random by a computer program. Thus, the study does not offer any information
about the appearance of naturally occurring emotional expressions. We also have
no way ofknowing whether participants trying to interpret the expressions would
have used the same cues if the expressions had been real. Of the action units that
seemed important early in the expression, one is common in both emotional and
unemotional situations (the eyelid raiser), one is specific to a single emotion (the
nose wrinkler), and the other two are rare whether people are feeling emotion
or not. It's hard to explain why people would rely strongly on action units that
are infrequent, even in emotional contexts, to classify expressions. Also, although
participants did have a "none of the above" option in labeling the expressions,
they were otherwise restricted to the six terms used in Ekman's research. If the par-
ticipants had been allowed to use other emotion terms to describe the expressions,
the results might have differed.
Rather than drawing firm conclusions from this one study, we recommend ap-
plying a critical eye to all of the research on facial expressions, asking carefully what
each study does and does not mean and realizing how much we still have to learn.
We know quite a bit about how people interpret facial expressions of emotion, but
fewer studies have analyzed expressions in emotional situations. The great major-
ity of research has examined a few strong prototypes that may or may not repre-
sent typical expressions, and it's hard to know whether findings generalize to most
real-life situations. Also, this study was only done with participants in one country
(Scotland), and results may not be the same with participants from other cultural
backgrounds. In sum, the evidence is sound that some aspects of emotional expres-
sion and interpretation are guided by human nature, but it's not yet clear what those
aspects are or how many expressions are universal. There is a great deal of room for
culture and learning to influence expression the subject to which we now turn.

CULTURE AND EMOTIONAL

EXPRESSION
Although the research suggests that people throughout the world interpret a few
facial expressions of emotion in similar ways, other expressions are clearly culture
specific. The prototypical expression of lajya, the Orissa Hindu emotion combin-
ing aspects of embarrassment and shame, includes biting one's tongue a display

130 EMOTION
not commonly observed in the United States (Menon & Shweder, 1994). In many
cultures, people indicate no by shaking their heads back and forth and yes by nod-
ding it up and down. In Greece and Turkey, however, people typically indicate yes
by tilting their heads back, and in Sri Lanka they express I understand by shaking
their heads back and forth. (You can imagine the misunderstanding as a Sri Lankan
person shakes his or her head to indicate understanding and an outsider takes the
expression to mean disagreement.) In the United States, people often give a gesture
of joining the tip of the thumb with the tip of the index finger to make a circle to
indicate we're in agreement, or OK In many other cultures, however, that gesture is
meaningless, and in some it is considered a vulgar invitation to have sex.
Some researchers distinguish gestures, or deliberate head and hand movements
like head nods and the OK gesture that often convey verbal content, from emotional
expressions. As with the vocabulary of spoken language, gestures are expected to vary
widely from culture to culture. Yet cultures differ in aspects offacial emotional expres-
sions as well. We will consider two processes that contribute to this variability: cultural
display rules for when emotional expressions are and are not appropriate; and ''dia-
lects" with which people in different cultures may accent their emotional expressions.

CULTURAL DISPLAY RULES

People learn from their culture when it is appropriate to amplify or conceal cer-
tain emotional expressions. Just as you do not always say in words everything that
you are thinking, you sometimes feel emotions without wanting to show them.
Cultures differ somewhat in their rules for which emotions should be shown and
which hidden, and in what circumstances. These cultural display rules are an im-
portant tool for any society. We learn at an early age when and where we can ex-
press our emotions freely and when it is best to hide them. For example, in a job
interview, you try not to act nervous. If a guest spills something on your carpet,
you try not to show anger. If a friend says something stupid, you try not to laugh.
Other display rules require us to express emotions even if we do not feel them.
Have you ever laughed politely at a joke that wasn't especially funny or displayed
more sorrow than you really felt over someone else's loss?
We learn these rules from the people around us, and cultures vary in their rules
and expectations. For example, European and American adults, especially men, are
discouraged from crying in public, but this prohibition is even stronger in other
cultures, such as China. What about public laughter? One of us (JWK) recalls
having dinner at a restaurant in Spain when the people at another table broke into
uproarious laughter. One ofthe Spanish people said, "They must be Americans. No
Spanish person would laugh that loudly in public:' Some cultures discourage emo-
tional expression in general. One study of Hmong immigrants to the United States
found that the immigrants who were more assimilated into US. culture expressed
a number of emotions more visibly than did those who were more traditional (Tsai,
Chentsova-Dutton, Freire-Bebeau, & Przymus, 2002).

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 131

 Wallace Friesen (1972) conducted a classic study of display rules, comparing
the behavior ofJapanese and American participants while they watched disgusting
videos of surgical procedures. Undergraduate participants first watched the videos
alone and then watched them again in the presence of an experimenter, introduced
as a graduate student and wearing a lab coat. Although participants from both
countries showed considerable disgust when they watched the video alone, Japa-
nese participants masked this disgust with a polite smile when the experimenter
was in the room (Friesen, 1972). Japan emphasizes the social hierarchy much more
than the United States, and the Japanese consider it inappropriate to show neg-
ative emotion to a high-status person. American participants were evidently less
intimidated by the experimenter and saw no reason to hide their feelings.
One study indicated that Americans expressed their emotions more visibly
than either Japanese or Russian people. Japanese and Russians were more likely
than Americans to qualify their display of negative emotions. That is, when dis-
playing fear, anger, or sadness, Japanese and Russian people often added a slight
smile to soften the impression, to indicate, "although I am distressed, it isn't really
that bad" (Matsumoto, Yoo, Hirayama, & Petrova, 2005). In the United States,
moderate displays of anger are common. In Japan, a high-status person can dis-
play anger toward subordinates, but almost any other display of anger is considered
shockingly inappropriate (Matsumoto, 1996).
Here is another kind of display rule: An American might ask a friend or ac-
quaintance for a favor. For example, one might say, "I am feeling sick, I need some
medicine, and I don't feel well enough to go the store myself Could you get the
medicine for me?" Asians and Asian Americans are less likely to ask for such sup-
port, because in that culture the other person would feel obligated to say yes, even
if it presented an impossible burden at the time. The Asian would not ask for help,
because asking might force the other person to say yes. An American does not
assume the other person will automatically say yes and therefore feels less reluc-
tance about asking (H. S. Kim, Sherman, & Taylor, 2008).
When we learn a display rule, we may superimpose it onto built-in biolog-
ical tendencies. Researchers videotaped facial expressions after various competi-
tors won or lost judo matches at the 2004 Olympics and at the Paralympic Games
(for people with a disability) in the same year. The observation was that people
smiled after a victory and frowned after a defeat, and the immediate expression
was about the same for sighted or blind competitors and for people from different
cultures. However, a moment or two later, participants from certain cultures-
mostly Asian restrained their expressions (Matsumoto & Willingham, 2009;
Matsumoto, Willingham, & 0 lide, 2009).
Why are people in some cultures more expressive than those in others,
especially in terms of negative emotion? David Matsumoto and his colleagues
(Matsumoto, Takeuchi, Andayani, Kouznetsova, & Krupp, 1998) analyzed data
from a large, international study of emotions and attitudes to find out. Their analy-
ses showed that both at the individual and at the cultural level, higher collectivism

132 EMOTION
was linked to stronger display rules for controlling the expression of negative emo-
tions. This finding was later replicated in a study with new data from 32 countries
(Matsumoto, Yoo, & Fontaine, 2008). However, display rules depend to some
extent on the person with whom someone is interacting. In Japan, it is more ap-
propriate to show negative emotions to acquaintances than to close friends and
family, whereas the reverse is true for Americans (Matsumoto, 1990; Matsumoto
et al., 2008). In each country this makes sense in terms of cultural values around
emotions and their role in relationships. In East Asia, people emphasize preserving
harmony in close relationships (Kwan, Bond, & Singelis, 1997), so it is safer to
express negative emotions elsewhere, toward people who are less important to you.
In the United States, people expect emotional authenticity in their close relation-
ships (H. S. Kim & Sherman, 2007), so it is considered appropriate to express neg-
ative emotions honestly to loved ones, but less appropriate toward acquaintances.
Display rules raise particular difficulties for bicultural people, those who are
members of more than one culture (A. 0. Harrison, Wilson, Pine, Chan, & Buriel,
1990; Laframboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993). Immigrants and their children are
bicultural, unless they settle in an area populated entirely by other immigrants from
the same country. In one study, East Asian immigrants to Canada filled out the same
questionnaire at three times on each of 10 days. At each time they recorded whether
they were with other Asians and speaking an Asian language or with Canadians of
European ancestry and speaking English. They also answered questions about their
beliefs and attitudes toward emotion. When immersed in Asian culture, they answered
the emotion questions in ways typical ofAsians. When immersed in Canadian culture,
they answered in ways more typical of other Canadians (Perunovic et al., 2007).
You might get the impression from these examples that only other cultures
have display rules, whereas Americans show what they feel. Americans typically
think they are supposed to show their feelings honestly, and emotional authen-
ticity is valued as a desirable trait (H. S. Kim & Sherman, 2007). However, Arlie
Hochschild ( 2002) offers a rich description of some American display rules in her
book The Managed Heart. In her research on the US. airline industry, Hochschild
found that companies make explicit demands for employees' emotional behavior,
especially that of flight attendants. As the front line of customer service, flight at-
tendants are expected to communicate pleasure, warmth, concern, and enthusiasm
as part of their daily work. Those applying for flight attendant positions may be put
through an explicit test of their sociability and perkiness or asked to chat lightly with
other applicants while recruiters evaluate their social style. Any failure to express the
appropriate feelings on the job typically leads to disapproval from supervisors.
Worse yet, changes within the airline industry since the events of September
11, 200 l, have led to mixed messages about the emotions flight attendants should
express. Flight attendants are supposed to be friendly, but not fake. Expressions of
emotion should seem natural. They should talk with customers, but not enough
to slow down the performance of their duties. They are expected to be warm, yet
make it clear that they are ready to discipline an unruly passenger or control a

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 133

 dangerous situation at a moment's notice. What we see here is a complex network
of rules about feelings, as well as emotional expressions.
The American combination ofprofessional display rules with cultural values for
emotional authenticity puts flight attendants (and others in similar service profes-
sions) in a bind. Many cultures encourage posing of appropriate emotional displays
without demanding that individuals feel what they express. In the United States,
however, people put a high premium on emotional genuineness. In one study, re-
searchers asked pairs of European American and Asian American women to view an
upsetting film about World War II and then to discuss the film (Butler, Lee, & Gross,
2009). Within each group, halfofthe participants were instructed to try to hide their
emotional reactions to the film from their partner. Among the European Americans,
those who were less expressive showed greater increases in blood pressure, suggesting
higher levels of stress in people who were concealing their emotions. In contrast, less
expressive Asian Americans did not show an increase in blood pressure, consistent
with the proposal that this culture encourages more restrained emotional displays.

FACIAL EXPRESSION DIALECTS

So far, we have emphasized cultural differences in the intensity of emotional ex-
pressions, but the content of expressions also varies from culture to culture. This
appears to be true even of the emotions studied by Ekman, Izard, and colleagues. In
one well-known article, Hilary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady (2002) conducted a
meta-analysis ofexisting expression recognition studies. This statistical technique com-
bines the results of many different studies as if they were a single, very large study. The
researchers found that accuracy was consistently higher when participants rated people
of the same national, ethnic, or regional group than when the photo was of someone
from a different group. This difference was especially notable when the photograph
was of a posed emotion ("now show me an expression of disgust") or a spontaneous
expression, rather than an expression defined by specific muscle movements. This result
strongly suggests that people from different cultures show somewhat different facial ex-
pressions, even ofpossible basic emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, and disgust.
You may be puzzled by this. If people have evolved, innate templates for facial
expressions of emotion, even just a few of them, shouldn't those emotions look
the same around the world? To take an analogy from language, people in different
regions of a country pronounce the same words somewhat differently and even
use some different words. For example, people in some parts of the United States
refer to carbonated soft drinks as pop, whereas people in other regions call it soda.
Both words are technically correct, and in fact, the term soda pop is the origin of
both words. The regions simply have different dialects and accents. People from
different regions understand each other, but people who live in the same region
might understand better.
Elfenbein proposed that people who live in different cultures also have differ-
ent dialects of facial expressions. To test this hypothesis, Elfenbein and colleagues

134 EMOTION
asked participants from two French-speaking regions ~ebec in Canada and
Gabon in sub-Saharan Africa to pose expressions of anger, fear, sadness, disgust,
happiness, surprise, contempt, shame, embarrassment, and serenity (Elfenbein,
Beaupre, Levesque, & Hess, 2007). Rather than asking the posers to move specific
facial muscles, the researchers gave the posers each emotion word and asked them
to pose an expression their friends could easily understand. All of the emotion
words were in French to avoid translation problems.
As expected, expressions posed by people from the two cultures had subtle
but consistent differences. For example, displays of happiness by the ~ebecois
were more likely to include contraction of the orbicularis oculi muscles surround-
ing the eyes (try this in front of a mirror if "crow's feet" wrinkles appear, then
you're doing it right), whereas displays of the same emotion by the Gabonese were
more likely to involve an open mouth. In expressing anger, the ~ebecois were
more likely to tighten their lips and squint, whereas the Gabonese were somewhat
more likely to widen their eyes. Importantly, the elements of each posed expression
across the two cultures were characteristic of the prototypical expressions used in
Ekman's research; it's just that some muscle movements were more pronounced in
one culture than in the other. In a follow-up study, the researchers showed these
posed expressions to new participants in each culture, along with expressions that
were matched to be morphologically identical. They found an in-group bias in
recognizing the free poses of the expressions, but not the matched poses. Both
findings are consistent with the notion of dialects in facial expressions of emotion.
Just as you might better understand the speech of someone with your own
regional dialect than that of someone from another region, people recognize facial
expressions of their own culture better than those of other cultures. In one study,
most Japanese people recognized Japanese facial expressions of anger and disgust,
but only 34% ofAmericans recognized the Japanese anger expression and only 18%
recognized the disgust expression (Dailey et al., 2010). People of the Himba pop-
ulation of Namibia accurately recognized happy and fearful expressions as posed
by African Americans, but they had little success with other expressions (Gendron,
Roberson, van der Vyver, & Barrett, 2014).

EMOTION IN POSTURE
AND THE VOICE
We noted earlier that facial expressions are not the only channels through
which people communicate about emotions. In fact, recognition rates for facial
expressions are increased if information about posture or the voice is included
(Van den Stock et al., 2007). But what about posture and voice on their own?
Do they reliably communicate emotions? Do people across cultures agree on
the code?

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 135

 POSTURE AND EMOTION
Ekman's and Izard's early studies of facial expressions shaped future research in many
ways. For example, a high percentage offuture studies examined the same emotions
that had been included in this early work. A more subtle effect was the intensity of
focus on the face as the main channel ofemotional expression, rather than other ways
ofcommunicating emotion, such as posture (Aviezer, Trope, & Todorov, 2012), voice
(Laukka & Elfenbein, 2012; Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, & Scott, 2010; Simon-Thomas
et al., 2009), and touch (Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, &Jaskolka, 2006).
One clever set ofstudies suggests that, for intense emotional experiences, posture
may be even more important than the face in communicating emotional valence-
whether one feels good or bad (Aviezer et al., 2012). Look at the faces in Figure 5.9.
These are photographs of real people playing tennis, right after either winning or
losing a point. Can you tell which is which? It turns out that most people are un-
certain, and when they guess, they are often wrong. How can that be? In Ekman's
research, happiness was consistently the easiest emotion for participants around the
world to identify, presumably because it was so clearly different from all of the nega-
tive emotions. Besides, even in dimensional models ofemotion, valence is supposed to
be the most important way in which emotions differ from each other. Of all the judg-
ments one should need to make about another's expression, the difference between
positive and negative emotion, or between pleasure and pain, should be the easiest.
It turns out that people can make the distinction reliably, but not based on the
face. Hillel Aviezer and colleagues (2012) asked participants to guess whether tennis
players had won or lost based on the face only, as in Figure S.9b; the body only (as in
S.9a) or the face and body combined. When participants could see the body, with or
without the face, they answered correctly, but with the face alone they could not tell
the difference. In a follow-up study these researchers asked what would happen ifthey
paired faces with bodies incorrectly, putting winners' faces with losers' bodies and vice
versa (see Figure 5.10). Although participants had been instructed to rate the players'

Figure 5.9.
Each of these expressions 1 2 3
was displayed by a tenn is
player right after a point was
scored. Can you tell who
1
won the point, and who lost?
From "Body Cues, Not Facial
Expressions, Discriminate
Between Intense Positive A B
and Negative Emotions," 4 5 6
by H. Aviezer, Y. Trope, and
A. Todorov, 2012, Science,
338(6111 ), 1225-1229. 2

136 EMOTION
 Figure 5.10.
2.0 1.6 In these photos, some
1.2
1.5
QI
I)
c
face-body pairs were
QI 1.0
ni
> 0.5 altered to send mixed
.!!
1 2 B j 0.0 · messages about whether
1; -0.5 -
QI
:IE -1.0
the person had won or lost
-0.7
-1.5 -1.1 a tennis point. Pictures 1
Lose Face Win Face Lose Face Win Face
Lose Body Win Body Win Body Lose Body and 3 include losers' faces;
A pictures 2 and 4 show
winners' faces. However,
picture 3 has a loser's
face on a winner's body,
3 4
and the opposite is true
for picture 4. Participants'
guesses about the players'
affect valence clearly
tracked the expressions
of the bodies, although
they had been instructed
emotional valence based on the facial expression (with higher ratings indicating more to focus on the face. From
positive valence), their ratings clearly tracked the emotion expression in the body, ac- "Body Cues, Not Facial
Expressions, Discriminate
curately identifying the winners while subconsciously using the postural cue.
Between Intense Positive
These studies highlight the importance of posture for communicating intense and Negative Emotions,"
emotions. Other research suggests that posture may be a more important cue for by H. Aviezer, Y. Trope, and
A. Todorov, 2012, Science,
some emotions than for others. In particular, research by Belinda Campos and col-
338(6111 ), 1225-1229.
leagues (B. Campos et al., 2013) suggests that posture may be especially important
for differentiating various positive emotions. You may have noted that, among the
six emotions studied by Ekman, only happiness was clearly positive. The prototyp-
ical happiness expression, shown in Figure S.4g, includes upturned lip corners and
contraction of the orbicularis oculi muscles surrounding the eyes; it's referred to as a
Duchenne smile in honor of Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne, the French
neurologist who described this expression in detail in the 18th century. Campos
and colleagues wanted to determine whether specific positive emotions might have
more distinct expressions. They asked undergraduates in the United States to tell
personal stories of their experiences with several positive emotions amusement,
love, pride, contentment, awe, and several others and then to pose what that emo-
tion would look like if they were to express it nonverbally to someone else.
Although many positive emotion poses did include a Duchenne smile, head
and posture movements were more distinctive (see Figure 5.11). For example,
in amusement poses the head was typically tilted back or to the side, or bobbled
around as though the person were laughing. In love poses, participants often
hugged themselves, and in interest they tended to lean forward. In pride poses,
participants sat up straight, puffed out their chests, and lifted their heads.
Both of the studies described above were conducted in the United States, so
it is unclear whether posture has the same meaning in other cultures. However, the
cross-cultural importance of posture is well established for the expression of one
emotion: pride (Tracy & Robins, 2004; Tracy& Robins, 2008b; Tracy et al., 2013).
Jessica Tracy and colleagues first recorded participants' posed displays of pride and

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 137

Figure 5.11.
Posed expressions of amusement, love, and pride all included a smile, but were more easily distinguished from each other by
head movement and/or posture.

found that they commonly include the postural expansion and head lift described
above, as well as arms lifted into the air or with hands on hips, taking up more space
and making the person seem larger. This display looks a great deal like the domi-
nance pose shown by nonhuman primates, suggesting that we may have inherited
this way of advertising our status from common ancestors. Tracy found that the
pride display was easily recognized by people in an isolated tribe in West Africa,
regardless of the ethnicity of the poser (Tracy & Robins, 2008b). In later research,
Tracy and colleagues (Tracy et al., 2013) found not only that Fijians also easily
recognized the pride display, but also that, like North Americans, Fijians implicitly
assumed that a person displaying pride likely has high social status. Although far
more cross-cultural research on emotional expression through posture is needed,
these studies suggest that other meanings ofposture may be universal as well.

VOCAL EXPRESSION OF EMOTION

Try saying, "Yes, I see;' with enthusiasm. Then say the same words to sound fright-
ened or sad. You will find that you can convey a good deal of emotion by your tone
ofvoice. Could you detect someone else's emotion from tone ofvoice even when you
couldn't make out any ofthe words? Casual experience suggests that we interpret tone
ofvoice easily. While writing this paragraph, one ofus (MNS) suddenly heard a burst
of distinctive shrieking from a hallway near her office, made a silent bet about what
was going on, and went to investigate. Sure enough, the hallway contained several
colleagues clustered around a young, extremely cute puppy. But anecdotal evidence is
not a good basis for scientific claims people are too prone to confirming their own
biases in observing the world, without even realizing it. How would researchers go
about collecting hard evidence on the nonverbal vocal expression of emotion?
First, they would need to obtain a wide range of vocal expressions intended
to communicate emotion states. In several studies, researchers have asked actors

138 EMOTION
and/or research participants to produce vocal bursts, wordless vocalizations
such as ah or mmm intended to express a particular emotion, and recorded these
bursts to analyze and play to participants in future studies. Researcher Emiliana
Simon-Thomas and colleagues (2009) used this approach to record one set of un-
dergraduate students' vocalizations expressing 9 negative and 13 positive emotions.
In a procedure similar to that used by Ekman to study recognition of facial expres-
sions, these researchers then played the vocal bursts for a new set of participants
and asked them to guess which emotion (or none of the above) was expressed from
a list of terms. To streamline the procedure while keeping the task challenging, the
researchers examined negative/neutral and positive emotions in different studies.
Simon-Thomas and colleagues (2009) reported that vocal bursts expressing
disgust, anger, sadness, and surprise were all recognized at high levels, with mean ac-
curacy rates from 60% to 83%. For fear vocal bursts, 37% chose the correct label, on
average, but 46% chose surprise, reflecting confusion between these two emotions
that is often seen in facial expression research as well. For contempt, embarrassment,
guilt, and shame, more people chose "none of the above" than the intended emo-
tion label. Among the positive emotions, amusement, interest, and reliefwere recog-
nized at rates from 66 to 81 %. Rates for recognition of enthusiasm (42%), pleasure
(35% ), awe (30% ), and compassion (24%) vocal bursts were lower, but the intended
label was still the most common choice. Not surprisingly, pleasure was most com-
monly chosen for the sexual desire vocal burst, with the intended label close behind.
For the love, gratitude, contentment, and pride vocal bursts, the option "none ofthe
above" was chosen by at least as many people as the intended emotion label.
These results show that some emotions were expressed and/or rec-
ognized more clearly through the voice than other emotions. Why might
this be? One apparent pattern is that emotions about something out there
in the environment were typically identified at higher rates, whereas emo-
tions focused on the relationship were less easily identified through the
voice. One advantage of vocal communication is that it can travel long
distances-unnecessary if you are interacting closely with another person.
It is notable that in studies of touch, the reverse seems to be true: Emotions
likely to be expressed in close relationships are more easily communicated
through touch, but emotions about external events are less easily commu-
nicated (Hertenstein et al., 2006).
In the studies described above, both the people who produced the
vocal bursts and the participants decoding them were from the United
States. Would these same sounds be recognized by people in other parts
of the world? Disa Sauter and colleagues (2010) began to address this
Figure 5.12.
problem by obtaining vocal bursts for several emotions from people in A Namibian participant in Sauter and
two cultures: English speakers in London and people from small, isolated colleagues' (Sauter, Eisner, Ekman,
& Scott, 2010) study, listening to
settlements in Namibia who had little or no exposure to Western voices.
two vocal bursts and then choosing
In each trial, the experimenter described an emotional situation and then the one that best fits an emotional
played two vocal bursts, asking which was more likely (see Figure 5.12). situation.

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 139

 This approach was similar to the methods used by Ekman with villagers in New
Guinea. Importantly, vocal bursts produced by both English and Namibian
posers were rated by participants in both cultures to determine whether there
was a systematic in-group advantage.
English participants easily interpreted the bursts produced by English
vocalizers, achieving almost perfect scores for each of nine emotions: fear,
anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, achievement, amusement, pleasure, and
relief. Namibian participants interpreting bursts by Namibian vocalizers did
somewhat worse (probably because this kind of task was so unfamiliar), but
still well above chance for all emotions except relief. Participants from both
cultures showed a modest in-group advantage, choosing the intended vocal
burst for each emotional situation at lower rates when the vocalizer and par-
ticipant were from different cultures than when they were from the same cul-
ture. Nonetheless, English participants still scored above chance in selecting
Namibian vocal bursts for all emotions; Namibian participants scored above
chance for all negative emotions and surprise, but only for amusement among
the positive emotions.
In an even more extensive study, Daniel Cordaro and colleagues (Cordaro
et al., 2016) recorded prototype vocal bursts for 16 different emotions, as pro-
duced by six individuals in the United States. Table 5.1 presents a brief description
of the typical sound for each emotion. Again, in each trial participants heard a
sentence describing a situation likely to elicit a particular emotion and then three
vocal bursts (all of the same valence); the participant chose the one that best
matched the situation or "none of the above:' Participants were college students
from 10 different countries representing East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle
East as well as Western nations.
With the exceptions of desire for food and sympathy in South Korea and sur-
prise in India, every vocal burst was recognized at above-chance (25%) levels in
every country, with overall mean accuracy around 80%. There was a main effect
of country on overall accuracy, with participants in South Korea doing worse than
those in other countries, especially for negative emotions, but on the whole, recog-
nition rates were very high. Cordaro and colleagues (2016) then repeated the task
with participants in a small, isolated village in Bhutan with no electricity and thus
no access to Western media. Although the proportion of participants choosing
the intended vocal burst for each emotion story was considerably lower than that
among college students in developed countries, it was significantly above chance
for all emotions except contempt and relief
One aspect of each of these studies of vocal expression is that, like most of
the work on facial expression, they are approaching the issue from a basic/discrete
emotion perspective. The vocal burst stimuli were intended to express specific
emotion categories, and the stories or emotion words matched to the bursts rep-
resented discrete categories as well. The component process model indicates an

140 EMOTION
 Table 5.1 Sounds included in vocal bursts for
several emotions
Descriptions of sounds in highly recognized vocal bursts for several emotions studied
by Simon-Thomas and colleagues (Simon-Thomas, Keltner, Sauter, Sinicropi-Yao, &
Abramson, 2009) and Cordaro and colleagues (Cordaro et al., 2016).

EMOTION VOCAL BURST

Amusement Laughter

Anger Growl

Awe "Wow"

Contempt "Thuh," spit sound

Contentment "Ahhh," long sigh

Desire "Mmm," savoring sound

Disgust "Ughh," retching

Embarrassment Self-conscious laughter, groan

Fear Scream

Interest "Mm hmm"

Pain "Ouch"

Relief "Whew," short sigh

Sadness Crying

Surprise Gasp

Sympathy "Aww"

Triumph "Woo-hoo"

From "The Voice Conveys Emotion in Ten Globalized Cultures and One Remote Village in Bhutan," by
D. T. Cordaro, D. Keltner, S. Tshering, D. Wangchuk, and L. M. Flynn, 2016, Emotion, 16(1), 117-128.

alternative approach. Petri Laukka and Hillary Elfenbein (2012) asked whether
the acoustic properties of vocal tone would be systematically associated with ap-
praisal dimensions in the component process model. In this case, the researchers
used a database of recordings by actors in the United States, who had been asked

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 141

 to express 1S emotions while describing a personal experience with each relevant
kind of situation (a relived emotion task). To retain tone of voice without giving
the situation away to participants, the researchers only used short clips of these
tales with neutral verbal content, such as "That's the way it happened."
The vocal clips were then played for participants. Instead of deciding which
emotion was expressed, however, participants were asked to rate each burst in
terms of inferred novelty, pleasantness, goal conduciveness, urgency, power, and
norm compatibility of the situation eliciting that tone of voice. Reliability among
participants was high (greater than .80) for each dimension, indicating that partic-
ipants agreed in their ratings. In general, the appraisal profiles for the vocal clips
were consistent with appraisal profiles for each of the emotions being expressed, as
identified in earlier research.
Although the majority of research on expression has focused on the face, the
studies described here make it clear that humans have several nonverbal channels
for displaying their feelings. One striking implication is that an emotion that is
clearly expressed in the face may not be expressed as clearly through tone of voice
or posture and vice versa. New complexities about emotion and its communication
are likely to be revealed as researchers examine these other modes of communica-
tion in greater depth.

CAN EXPRESSION INFLUENCE

EMOTIONAL FEELINGS?
William James proposed that our emotional feelings are caused by instinctive be-
havioral and physiological responses to emotional situations; his classic example
was that of running away from a bear and therefore
feeling fear. Are emotional behaviors, such as non-
verbal expressions of emotion, necessary for emo-
tional feeling? If not, do these behaviors at least
intensify emotional feeling?
An extreme hypothesis based on James's theory
is that, if you were unable to make facial expressions,
you would no longer be able to experience emo-
tional feelings. This hypothesis is not supported by
the available data. People with permanent paralysis
of the facial muscles adjust to their condition over
time and report feeling normal emotions (Keillor,
Barrett, Crucian, Kortenkamp, & Heilman, 2002).
People with Mobius syndrome (a rare congenital
Figure 5.13. condition) are unable to smile. They nevertheless
This girl with Mobius syndrome could not smile before a surgical
procedure created an artificial expression. She could feel report feeling happy or amused. The condition does
happiness, however, and had a sense of humor. have serious consequences, but they are mediated by

142 EMOTION
social factors rather than being a direct effect of the condition on emotional ex-
perience; inability to smile can make relationships with people awkward. The girl
in Figure 5.13 underwent surgery to give her an artificial smile (G. Miller, 2007).
However, the evidence suggests that facial expressions are not necessary for emo-
tional feelings.
A more moderate hypothesis might be that people would still feel emotions,
just less intensely. In one study, researchers temporarily paralyzed participants'
frown muscles with botulinum toxin (Botox). Until the toxin wore off, people
had weaker than normal brain responses to the sight of other people's angry ex-
pressions, apparently because they could not frown back at people frowning at
them (Hennenlotter et al., 2009). However, the brain responses did not neces-
sarily reflect feelings of anger.
Facial expressions and other nonverbal behaviors may not be necessary for
feelings of emotion, but they could still help create such feelings. This proposal
is referred to as the facial feedback hypothesis. For example, does smiling make
you feel happy or amused, and does frowning make you feel annoyed? To test
these hypotheses, researchers can't simply tell people to smile or frown and then
ask them how they feel (they could, but it wouldn't be a good idea). If you were
in that study, you would probably guess what hypothesis the experimenters were
testing, and you might say you were feeling an emotion just because it was what
you thought they wanted you to say. Psychological researchers call this problem
one of demand characteristics, meaning the cues that tell participants what the
experimenter hopes to see.
To avoid demand characteristics, researchers use methods that disguise the
intention of the study. Here is one clever procedure, which you can try yourself
or ask a friend to try: Hold a pen
with your lips, as illustrated in
-
- .. _
-

Figure 5.14. Later, repeat the pro-

cedure holding the pen with your
teeth. In each case, go through a
stack of newspaper comic strips,
rating each one as very funny ( +),
somewhat funny ( "1), or not funny
(-). When holding the pen with
your teeth, you are virtually forced
to smile; when holding it with your
lips, you press your lips together
in a way that people do when they
are angry or annoyed. In one study,
participants holding the pen in a
smiling position rated cartoons
Figure 5.14. Holding a pen with your teeth forces you to smile; holding it with
slightly funnier than did those who your lips prevents smiling.
held it in the annoyed position People reading comics with the pen in their teeth found comics more amusing.

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 143

 (Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988); that is, the sensation of smiling appeared to
•
increase amusement.
Since Strack and colleagues' (1988) study, the basic principle of the facial
feedback hypothesis has been supported by dozens of additional studies using
similar, although not identical, methods ( e.g., Dimberg & Soderkvist, 2011;
Duclos & Laird, 2001; Hess, Kappas, McHugo, Lanzetta, & Kleck, 1992;
Mcintosh, 1996; Mori & Mori, 2009). One study indicated similar results in
participant ratings of movies instead of cartoons (Soussignan, 2002). In another
study, researchers theorized that if smiling increases amusement, frowning might
decrease it. To test this hypothesis, they told participants they were in a study of
divided attention and asked them to do two activities at once. One activity was to
rate the pleasantness or unpleasantness of various photos. The other was a motor
task: The experimenters attached golf tees above the participants' eyebrows. The
participants were instructed to keep the tips of the two golf tees touching each
other. The only way to do that was to frown, so the instructions sneakily got the
participants to frown without directly telling them to do so. While participants
were frowning, they rated most photos as less pleasant than when they were not
instructed to touch the golf tees together (R. J. Larsen, Kasimatis, & Frey, 1992).
Studies have also indicated that injecting Botox into people's facial muscles can
alter their subjective experience of emotions (e.g., J. I. Davis, Senghas, Brandt, &
Ochsner, 2010) and even reduce their ability to recognize other people's emotions,
presumably because it inhibits the ability to mimic others' expressions (Neal &
Chartrand, 2011 ).
In one study, researchers asked 54 college students to adopt certain postures as
well as facial movements. They concealed the point of the experiment by describ-
ing it as a study of how people's movements affected their thinking. They went on
to say that sometimes feelings influence the relationship between movements and
thinking, so they would have to ask about emotional feelings as well as thoughts.
Then they gave detailed instructions about what muscles to move and postures to
adopt (Flack, Laird, & Cavallaro, 1999).
Their instructions follow. Try them and see whether you start to feel any emo-
tion. Unfortunately, unlike the participants in the experiment, you know the hypoth-
esis, so your results are contaminated by your expectations. However, you could try
administering these procedures to a few friends without telling them the hypothesis.

1. Push your eyebrows together and down. Clench your teeth tightly and push
your lips together. Put your feet flat on the floor directly below your knees,
and put your forearms and elbows on the arms of the chair. Now clench your
fists tightly and lean your upper body slightly forward.
2. Lower your eyebrows down toward your cheeks. With your mouth closed,
push up lightly with your lower lip. While sitting, rest your back comfortably
against the chair and draw your feet loosely in under the chair. You should

144 EMOTION
 feel no tension in your legs or feet. Now fold your hands in your lap, just
loosely cupping one hand in the other. Drop your head, letting your rib cage
fall and letting the rest of your body go limp. You should feel just a slight
tension up the back of your neck and across your shoulder blades.
3. Raise your eyebrows and open your eyes wide. Move your whole head
back, so that your chin is tucked in a little, and let your mouth relax and
hang open a little. Scoot to the front edge of your chair and draw your feet
together and underneath the chair. Now turn your upper body toward the
right, twisting a little at the waist, but keeping your head facing forward.
Now dip your right shoulder a bit and lean your upper body slightly back-
ward. Raise your hands to about mouth level, arms bent at the elbow and
palms facing forward.
4. Push the comers ofyour mouth up and back, letting your mouth open a
little. Sit up as straight as you can in your chair. Put your hands at the ends
of the armrests and make sure that your legs are straight in front of you, with
your knees bent and feet directly below your knees.

Instruction 1 was intended to induce anger. On average, participants reported

higher than usual anger levels and also somewhat elevated levels of disgust. In-
struction 2 was intended to induce sadness, and it did, without elevating other
emotions. Instruction 3 was meant for fear, but these results were less clear. People
reported an elevated fear level, but an even more elevated feeling of surprise. This
result makes sense, because the facial expressions and postures associated with fear
and surprise are similar. Finally, Instruction 4 was intended for happiness, and
people following this instruction did report greater happiness, on average.
The graph in Figure 5.15 shows the results for all four instructions, arranged
left to right: anger, sadness, fear, and happiness. For each set
ofinstructions, people reported the intensity ofsix emotional 5
feelings: anger, sadness, fear, happiness, disgust, and surprise.
4
Note that each set of instructions aroused the intended emo-
tion and sometimes also a related emotion. Unfortunately, 3
the researchers did not report a baseline of how much of each 2
emotion people might feel when given no particular instruc-
1
tions about facial expression or posture. Oops.
These studies are referred to as conceptual replications;
Anger Sadness Fear Happiness
they address the same theoretical principle as an original
Anger Sadness • Fear
study, but using different methods. Although there are
• Happiness • Disgust • Surprise
slightly different versions of the facial feedback hypoth-
esis (e.g., can facial muscle movements initiate an emo- Figure 5.15.
Facial and postural instructions intended to evoke
tional feeling or only modulate one you have anyway?),
anger, sadness, fear, and happiness did elicit these
the basic idea was supported by several published, concep- emotions, but in some cases they elicited other, related
tual replications and has been widely accepted for many emotions as well (Flack, Laird, & Cavallaro, 1999).

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 145

 years; so much so, in fact, that Strack suggested it would be a good test case for
a large-scale replication effort, in which several researchers agree to conduct
the same study independently (a direct replication) and assess whether the
new results are consistent with the original findings. In recent years, several
other studies had failed to pass this kind of replication test, but in these cases
the original studies offered findings many had thought implausible to begin
with. In contrast, here was a rock-solid finding with lots of evidence-it should
replicate with no problem, right? Another psychologist, E.-J. Wagenmakers,
took up the challenge, preparing instructions for a study that was as similar as
possible to the original and inviting researchers from other labs to participate.
Ultimately, 17 identical studies were conducted, with nearly 2,000 partici-
pants. What did they find?
Nothing. Across studies, the pen-in-the-mouth manipulation had essen-
tially zero effect on participants' ratings of how funny the cartoons were (Wa-
genmakers, Beek, Dijkhoff, & Gronau, 2016). What does this mean for the
facial feedback hypothesis? We don't really know. Researchers are not ready
to discard the hypothesis because of one set of failed replications. There are
many reasons why the new studies might not have worked. The cartoons in
the new studies differed from those in the original, and although they were
carefully pretested, it's possible that something about them did not work. Also,
the new studies were carried out nearly 30 years after the original. Although
it's unlikely that people's facial feedback mechanisms have changed in that
time, university undergraduates have changed substantially, and something
about the methods may have had different meaning decades later. A substan-
tial number of participants in the replication studies may even have heard of
the effect before and were somehow on guard against it. The point is, we don't
know. Any explanation must account for both the failed replication studies
and the large number of successful studies that have been published. Facial
feedback most likely modulates emotional experience sometimes and in some
circumstances, but not always; future research will need to solve the puzzle of
when the effect is reliable and when it disappears.
In general, it's important to interpret the results of any single study with cau-
tion. Although popular magazines, websites, and other news media may report
some new study finding with huge excitement, any one study will inevitably have
limitations and may only have examined a small number of people. Here's an-
other example of a study in which the original findings were only partially sup-
ported by later replication efforts. Earlier we described the postural expression of
pride, in which the body expands to take up more space, typical of the behavior
of other mammals expressing dominance. In this study, researchers randomly as-
signed participants to adopt either a power pose, with open, expanded limbs, or
a more contracted pose, with arms and legs held close to the body. After holding
the pose for a couple of minutes, participants completed a financial gambling

146 EMOTION
task and rated their subjective feelings of power. Consistent with the facial (pos-
tural) feedback hypothesis, those in the power pose condition reported feeling
more powerful than those given the less expansive pose. They also made riskier
decisions in the gambling task and showed hormonal changes consistent with
increased dominance (higher testosterone) and decreased stress (lower cortisol)
after the task (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2010). That's a remarkable finding!
However, the original study included only 42 participants across the two
posture conditions. In any single study, scientists worry that the results may be
a fluke, reflecting features of a few people who happen to be in this sample that
might not appear in the larger population of interest; when a sample is this small,
it's of particular concern. Another team of researchers attempted to replicate the
study, this time with 200 participants. Although they were able to replicate the
effect of the power pose on subjective feelings ofpower, the effects on risk-taking
behavior and on hormones disappeared (Ranehill et al., 2015). Does the power
pose increase dominance or not? Good psychology researchers are careful about
giving simple answers to all-or-none questions like this. The power pose probably
has some effect, but more research is needed to determine which effects are con-
sistently observed and under what conditions.

SUMMARY
At the beginning of this chapter, we asserted that the modern field of affective
science exists in large part because of research on facial expression. We hope that
you now understand the reasons for this claim. Darwin's ideas about emotional
expression laid the foundation for thinking of emotion as an evolved aspect of
human nature, and Ekman's and Izard's early studies on facial expression recog-
nition revolutionized the status of emotion in psychology. Indeed, these results
demonstrated the mere possibility of doing meaningful research on emotion. For
better or for worse, the six emotions included in Ekman's studies were the only
ones studied for decades, and many still state that these are the six basic emo-
tions. You should realize now that this claim goes beyond the data. Researchers
have not reached a consensus about whether it is best to analyze emotions in
terms of basic emotions or continuous dimensions, and even if we do talk about
basic emotions, the number of such emotions is debatable.
What are the other take-home lessons from this chapter? One is that emotions
can be reliably expressed in channels beyond the face, including posture, voice, and
touch. Our ability to communicate emotion is highly sophisticated, even without
words, and much of this nonverbal language is understood across cultures. This
suggests that some aspects of emotional expression and perception are rooted in
human nature. However, culture plays a powerful role as well. Rather than a battle
between nature and nurture, the research on emotional expression suggests that

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 147

 evolutionary and cultural forces interact with each other in complex ways to pro-
duce our expressions; display rules and expressive dialects are two examples. This
principle of nature/nurture interaction applies in many other aspects of emotion as
well and throughout psychology.
We also introduced a discussion of the need for caution in interpreting re-
search results, especially when they come from a single study. In several places in
this textbook, we'll encounter situations in which one body of research reaches
one conclusion and another body of research reaches the opposite conclusion. Our
response to this is not to throw our hands in the air and give up on science alto-
gether, but instead to look carefully at the methods used in different studies and
ask whether they might account for the discrepancy. We don't know the answer
to every question that we'll raise, but we'll be honest with you about controversies
that are out there and how researchers are moving forward.

KEY TERMS
action unit: in the Facial Action Coding System, the number and name as-
signed to the visible effects of contracting a specific facial muscle (p. 123)
biculturalism: the ability to alternate between membership in one culture
and membership in another (p. 133)
conceptual replication: a study that attempts to support the theoretical
implications of a previous study's findings, but using slightly different
methods (p. 145)
demand characteristics: cues in a research study that reveal what the exper-
imenters hope to find; participants may knowingly or unconsciously comply
with these wishes (p. 143)
dialect: group differences in accent and vocabulary within a language (in
this case, facial expression of emotion), such that people from different
groups can understand each other, but still find it easier to understand in-
group than out-group members (p. 134)
direct replication: a new study that uses the same methods as a previous
study to see whether the original findings are repeated (p. 146)
display rules: cultural norms about when and with whom it is appropriate to
display certain kinds of emotional expressions (p. 131)
Duchenne smile: a smile that includes contraction of the orbicularis oculi
muscles surrounding the eyes, as well as raised lip corners (p. 137)
Facial Action Coding System (FACS): a system for coding the specific mus-
cles that contract in a person's facial expression (p. 123)
facial feedback hypothesis: the hypothesis that a posed facial expression of
emotion can help generate an emotional feeling (p. 143)

148 EMOTION
 free labeling: a method in which participants see a facial expression and
come up with their own label for the emotion rather than choosing one from
a predefined set of options (p. 127)
gesture: deliberate head and hand movements that convey semantic content
and are often culture specific (p. 131)
meta-analysis: a statistical technique that combines the results of many dif-
ferent studies into a single analysis (p. 134)
Mobius syndrome: a rare, congenital condition in which people are physi-
cally unable to smile (p. 142)
vocal bursts: wordless vocalizations such as ah or mmm, intended to express
a particular emotion (p. 139)

THOUGHT/DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Most research on facial expressions of emotion has studied people's inter-
pretations of expressions. If you wanted to study the expressions people
make when feeling various emotions, what task might you use? What are the
strengths and limitations of different approaches?
2. People frown (contract the muscle that pulls the eyebrows together and
down toward the top of the nose) as part of many negative emotion expres-
sions. However, not all negative expressions include a frown, and people
often frown when they are not feeling negative. What are other situations in
which people frown? What explanation might Klaus Scherer's component
process model offer for this muscle movement?
3. Think about the ways that emotion is expressed in music.
What acoustic properties convey cheerfulness, sadness, fear, anger,
and so forth? Do they map onto the properties of these emotions in
human voices as well?
4. We noted in this chapter that different emotions seem to be communicated
best through different expressive channels. What kinds of emotions might
be communicated most effectively through facial expression, posture, vocal
expression, and touch? Explain your answer.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Ekman, P. (2009). Telling lies: Clues to deceit in the marketplace, politics, and mar-
riage. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. A synthesis of the research on ways nonverbal
expressions can indicate someone may be lying.
Ekman, P., & Rosenberg, E. L. (2005). What the face reveals: Basic and applied
studies ofspontaneous expression using the FacialAction Coding System (FA CS) (2nd ed.).
New York, NY: Oxford University Press. A collection of chapters addressing a wide

Emotional Expression in the Face, Posture, and Voice 149

 range of questions about emotional expression, including the relationship of expres-
sion and feeling, developmental trajectories, and applications to clinical and health
psychology.
Levitin, D. J. (2007). This isyour brain on music: The science ofa human obsession.
New York, NY: Plume. Written by a combined musician and neuroscientist, this
book explores the psychological mechanisms of our emotional responses to music.

150 EMOTION