Facial Expressions Research Paper

2. Defining Facial Expressions

Of all the forms of human communication, which includes the written and spoken word, body language, and so forth, facial expressions are recognized as among the most salient and influential. Researchers reserve the term ‘facial expression’ for those recurring configurations of facial muscle movements that communicate some thought, emotion, or behavior. This is because not all recurring facial muscle configurations express specific messages. For example, some facial muscle actions that accompany spoken words—such as raising one’s eyebrows when emphasizing a particular word—may modify those words, but are not messages in and of themselves (e.g., Ekman 1991).

The face can express various thoughts. For example, a person who raises the outer corner of one eyebrow may convey sophisticated skepticism. A person whose eyebrows are pulled up in the middle may convey sympathy for another. A wink can convey that one is kidding. Flashing both eyebrows upward may convey a greeting. Or, lowered eyebrows may convey uncertainty (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989). Researchers agree for the most part that these types of facial expressions are learned like language, displayed under conscious control, and their meanings are culturally specific that rely on context for proper interpretation (e.g., Birdwhistell 1970). Thus, the same lowered eyebrow expression that would convey ‘uncertainty’ in North America might convey ‘no’ in Borneo (Darwin 1872 1998).

The face can also express emotions. For example, humans express the emotion of happiness by raising lip corners into what is commonly called a smile. Humans can express sadness by frowning. Besides happiness and sadness, other emotions that seem to have specific facial expressions include anger, disgust, fear, and surprise, and to a lesser extent contempt, embarrassment, interest, pain, and shame (e.g., Ekman 1993, Izard 1991). What makes the facial expression of these aforementioned emotions different from other facial expressions is that there is evidence that these emotions are expressed and interpreted the same across all cultures (e.g., Ekman 1993, Izard 1971). This ‘universal’ production and perception across cultures suggests that those emotions and their specific facial expressions might be determined genetically, rather than socially learned. However, this claim is not without controversy (e.g., Russell 1994).

3. Neuroanatomy Of Facial Expression

The idea that facial expressions can be both determined genetically, as in the case of some of the emotions, and learned socially, as in the case of all other facial expressions, is supported by an examination the neuroanatomy of the face. There appears to be two distinct neural pathways that mediate facial expressions, each originating in a different area of the brain; one area for the voluntary, willful facial actions (the cortical motor strip), and the second area for the more involuntary, emotional facial actions (subcortical areas; reviewed by Rinn 1984). This dual origin hypothesis is supported by clinical observations of patients who are paralyzed on one side of their face. When these patients were asked to pose a smile, they could only smile on half their face. Yet when these same patients felt the spontaneous emotion of enjoyment after being told a funny joke, they were able to smile on both sides of their face. Likewise, patients with lesions of the subcortical areas of the brain such as the basal ganglia have difficulty showing spontaneous, emotional facial expressions; however, these patients are able to move their facial muscles on command. These facial action observations are so reliable that they serve as diagnostic criteria for brain lesions.

4. History Of Facial Expression Research

The turbulent history of the systematic study of facial expressions began with the publication of Darwin’s book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872 1998). In this book, Darwin proposed that humans across all cultures have particular and distinct facial expressions for particular emotions, and that these expressions are produced involuntarily as a result of that emotion. Darwin defined emotions as behavioral and physiological reactions that have helped humans and animals to survive the various life challenges they faced throughout their evolutionary history. For example, the fear reaction assisted humans and animals escape danger, the anger reaction assisted humans and animals to fight rivals, and so forth. Those who possessed these emotional reactions were more likely to live to reproductive age and therefore pass their genes to the next generation.

What Darwin argued (and elaborated by others, e.g., Ekman 1991, Izard 1991, Plutchik 1991) is that social animals, such as humans, must communicate these emotions to others in the group because emotions express imminent behavior, such as striking out in anger, fleeing in fear, and so on. The facial expression of anger thus becomes the visual signal of this intention to strike. This signal allows others in the group to avoid this person, and thus avoid a potential fight (although others argue that these expressions would deprive an individual of a competitive advantage like the element of surprise prior to an attack, e.g., Fridlund 1994). These facial expressions of emotion were seen as vestiges of an entirely nonverbal human communication system that must have existed in extinct human forms such as Neanderthal, because only modern humans have the throat structures necessary to produce articulate speech. A further clue to this prehistoric human communication comes from the genetically closest living relatives of humans, the chimpanzees, who have a repertoire of facial expressions of emotion that parallel, but are not identical to, human facial expressions of emotion. Thus, current human facial expression of emotion represents more the communication methods of the past genetic history of the species, rather than its present conditions (Brown 1991).

However, much of the empirical work that followed Darwin’s book failed to support his notion that there were particular facial expressions for particular emotions. For example, when subjects were startled by firecrackers, embarrassed, or disgusted by having to decapitate a live rat, their most common facial expression shown across all these situations was a smile, even though these subjects were not experiencing positive emotion. Likewise, observations of people outside North America by social scientists cast further doubt; for example, the smile was observed as an expression of uncertainty in Africans but as an expression of sadness in Japanese women. Findings such as these—although there were scattered findings to the contrary—caused scholars to conclude that facial expressions did not provide accurate information as to emotional state (Birdwhistell 1970). Thus, by the early 1960s, social science seemed to conclude that all facial expressions—including facial expressions of emotion—were culturally relative, socially learned, and that there were no universals.

Despite this conclusion, two theorists revived Darwin’s ideas about the evolutionary origins of facial expressions of emotion (Plutchik 1991, Tomkins 1962 1963). These researchers took photographs of people posing prototypical emotions such as anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and so on, and found that observers would agree as to which expression represented which emotion. Other researchers found similar results with various European, South American, African, and Asian cultures (e.g., Izard 1971). Proponents of the social learning cultural relativism perspective counter-argued that the populations upon which this evidence for universality was based were mostly educated, and thus could have learned from various forms of media which expressions represented which emotions (e.g., Birdwhistell 1970). To parry this argument, researchers conducted similar studies with visually isolated peoples whom had limited contact with Westerners, and thus could not have learned these expressions from the media (e.g., the Sadong of Borneo, and Fore in New Guinea). These researchers found for the most part the same pattern of universal expression and recognition of facial expressions of emotion as in the Westernized peoples (e.g., Ekman 1993). Follow up research using a variety of methodological alterations to this basic paradigm found patterns consistent universality throughout the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Izard 1991). Finally, parallel evidence in favor of universality came from observations of children who were born blind and deaf, and who could not have seen these facial expressions to learn how to express them. These children showed similar expressions of emotion as their sighted counterparts (EiblEibesfeldt 1989).

However, proponents of Darwin’s idea were still stuck with the findings that peoples of different cultures sometimes showed different expressions for a given emotion than North Americans. Ekman proposed that the reason this happened was that different cultures learned different rules to regulate their facial expression of emotion—what he called ‘display rules’ (Ekman 1993). For example, Japanese culture has a display rule that prohibits expression of anger or disgust to higher status people, unlike North American culture. Researchers found that both groups showed facial expressions of disgust when viewing a gruesome film alone. But when in the presence of a high status person, the Japanese group hid their disgust feelings with a smile, whereas the Americans still showed disgust expressions. This concept of display rules seemed to account for why people smiled to such seemingly different events as the death of a loved one, confusion, uncertainty, startle, sexual excitement, disgust, and so on (Ekman 1991). Based on these findings, Ekman (1993) proposed his neurocultural theory of emotions. This theory argued that certain basic human emotions generated particular patterns of physiology and facial expressions, that these facial expressions were universal across all cultures, but that their ultimate expression was modified, exacerbated, suppressed, or masked by social learning processes dependent upon personal, family, or cultural display rules.

5. Current Facial Expression Research

By the early 1990s, a consensus seemingly emerged in the field of psychology that Darwin was correct after all—that some facial expressions of emotion were universal. This was not a peaceful consensus; social scientists who placed the uniqueness of culture at the forefront of any understanding of emotion were not convinced of universality, based on the observations described earlier (e.g., Russell 1994). Experimental psychology itself issued two challenges to universality in the early 1990s. One challenge suggested that all facial expressions were simply communicative gestures, that is, they are not the result of internal emotional states, but only the result of the social motives of the person within a particular context (the ‘behavioral ecology’ view; Fridlund 1994). The behavioral ecology view found that facial expression, particularly smiling, was related not to felt emotion, but to the presence of others. Proponents of universality counter-argued that not all smiles are the same. They demonstrated that only one type of smile, called the enjoyment smile, is related to the positive emotional experience of enjoyment, as measured through self-report or pattern of brain activity. This enjoyment smile looks different from other smiles in that only enjoyment smiles feature orbicularis oculi action (the muscles surrounding the eye that give a ‘crow’s feet’ appearance) along with zygomatic major action (the typical lip corner raising). Failing to note the distinction between enjoyment and other smiles may have been why other researchers found no relationship between smiling and positive emotion (Ekman and Rosenberg 1998).

A second challenge to universality attacked the concepts behind what was meant by universality, as well as the methods used to document universality. These methodological problems—such as biased response forms and preselected facial expressions— when added together may have conspired to bias observers’ judgments, causing them to artificially agree on which facial expression represented which emotion (Russell 1994). Prompted by these criticisms, ensuing experimental research corrected many of the proposed methodological shortcomings, and has so far reconfirmed support for the universality of facial expressions of emotion (Ekman 1994).

Although the issue of the biological vs. social origins of facial expressions of emotion is not fully resolved, what has been impressive is the amount of current research generated by the findings on universality of facial expressions of emotion (Ekman 1993). First, researchers have shown that people who pose and hold these universal facial expressions of emotion begin to experience the particular emotion they are posing— although researchers have debated the exact role of a facial expression in reflecting vs. causing an emotion (e.g., Buck 1988). Regardless, this phenomenon has enabled researchers to document physiologically specific patterns of arousal for specific emotions, and in more than one culture. Second, these universal facial expressions of emotion have been employed in studies of brain activity, leading researchers to discover that there are centers in the human brain that respond specifically to these expressions (e.g., the amygdala responds to fear expressions; Whalen 1998). Third, this work on the universal facial expressions has prompted researchers to examine their origins in children (e.g., Izard and Malatesta 1987). This work has shown that children as young as 12 months of age react differently to their mothers’ expressions of fear versus to happiness; a mother’s fear expression will stop a child’s risky behavior, whereas a mother’s happy expression will not.

These universal expressions of emotion have also shown utility as markers of social and psychological functioning. For example, the presence of enjoyment smiles on the part of a person who has survived the death of their romantic partner predicts successful coping with that traumatic loss. Schizophrenic patients tend to show different, and sometimes fewer or more disorganized facial expressions than normal patients (reviewed by Ekman and Rosenberg 1998). Mothers show different sorts of smiles to their difficult compared to their nondifficult children. The facial expression of disgust or contempt, but not anger, predicts marital divorce (Gottman 1994). Researchers found that these unbidden facial expressions of emotion can occur for very brief flashes, called ‘microexpressions,’ that under certain circumstances can betray deception (Ekman 1991). Thus, current research on facial expressions has moved away from documenting the existence of these emotional facial expressions and has moved toward examining the implications of the presence or absence of these facial expressions and their corresponding emotions on human social development, interaction, relationships, and psychopathology.

6. Future Directions Of Facial Expression Research

Advances in technology will aid facial expression research by allowing researchers to quickly, validly, and reliably observe facial expressions. This will be helpful to the field because current work on facial expression is extremely time and labor intensive, or suffers from other experimental concerns. For example, visible scoring systems, that require close examination of videotape, can take 60 minutes to analyze one minute of behavior (e.g., Ekman and Rosenberg 1998, Izard and Malatesta 1987). Electromyographic techniques, that use electrodes on the face to measure the faint electrical impulses produced by muscle contractions, suffer from concerns about the salience of electrodes on a person’s face affecting the behavior of that person (e.g., Fridlund 1994). In the future, computer based analysis programs will be developed to assess the specific muscle movements associated with facial expressions at a much faster, and more reliable way, than these older methods, without causing awareness on the part of the person being analyzed. This will have the effect of making research on facial expression more accessible to more researchers, which can only help the field progress more quickly than in the past.

There are many questions ‘facing’ future facial expression research, and space limitations permit only a description of a few. First, researchers will try to clarify the stimuli and processes by which social information elicits an emotion and its expression (the ‘appraisal’ process; Scherer et al. 2000), as well as the process by which people learn to control their emotional facial expressions. This inquiry might provide researchers with a gateway to understanding better the role of expression in the experience and management of emotions. It will also lead to understanding how perceptions of facial expressions may account for differences in social competence and functioning, or ‘emotional intelligence’ of adults and children. An offshoot of this work would explore whether professionals and lay people can be trained to improve their accuracy at interpreting emotional expressions, and the implications this has for their relationships. Second, researchers will move toward investigating more interactional research designs that place the facial expression of emotion back into the social context which it is typically embedded, to measure the consequences of such expression in the real world. Third, given that much of the previous work has been with posed expressions, future work would employ more spontaneous facial expressions. Fourth, with the assistance of technology that allows noninvasive observation of the working brain (e.g., Positron Emission Tomography or functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), researchers will continue to use facial expressions of emotion to map where in the brain the expressions are perceived as well as where they are generated (e.g., Whalen 1998). Fifth, an examination of these first four future directions will inevitably lead to a better understanding of individual differences in production, control, and recognition of facial expressions, of which there is little work at present. Finally, this work would need to be expanded to cultures other than Europe or North America to assess the relative universality of the process of emotion, its antecedents, attempts to control, and its effect on facial expression (e.g., Ekman 1993).

Research on facial expressions has both paralleled and driven changes in the general assumptions in the field of psychology. The finding that people of all cultures seemed to agree on which facial expressions represented which emotions pushed psychology toward re-examining the biological bases for behavior. But research on facial expressions will continue to be controversial because it exposes the strong feelings of those who believe in the power of social situations to mold all human behavior, expressive or not, and those who believe in the biological origins of some of those behaviors. Thus, debates over facial expressions are really debates about human nature—a debate that has tormented social science from time immemorial. What research on facial expression has done is to help move this debate away from an argument over political beliefs about human nature, and toward an argument over observable data.

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