Social Motives,Emotional Feelings,and Smiling

Previous research has established that the facial displays of those who listen to stories are influenced by the social context in which this happens. H owever, experienced affect was not measured in these studies, and the story stimuli were not systematically manipulated. We report a study in which participants listened to stories that varied in rated funniness, and that were told by either a friend or a stranger via one of the following channels: Tape recorder, telephone, or face-to-face. D ependent measures included facial activity, subjective feelings, and social motives. We anticipated that facial displays would be influenced by story type and by social context, and that the former effects would be mediated by experienced affect, whereas the latter effects would be mediated by social motives. The funnier story elicited more smiling, but this was not mediated by experienced affect. Social context also influenced smiling, and this effect appeared to be mediated by social motives.     

Avoidance of emotional facial expressions in social anxiety: The Approach-Avoidance Task

The Approach–Avoidance Task (AAT) was employed to indirectly investigate avoidance reactions to stimuli of potential social threat. Forty-three highly socially anxious individuals (HSAs) and 43 non-anxious controls (NACs) reacted to pictures of emotional facial expressions (angry, neutral, or smiling) or to control pictures (puzzles) by pulling a joystick towards themselves (approach) versus pushing it away from themselves (avoidance). HSAs showed stronger avoidance tendencies than NACs for smiling as well as angry faces, whereas no group differences were found for neutral faces and puzzles. In contrast, valence ratings of the emotional facial expressions did not differ between groups. A critical discrepancy between direct and indirect measures was observed for smiling faces: HSAs evaluated them positively, but reacted to them with avoidance.     

Smiling, frowning, and autonomic activity in mildly depressed and nondepressed men in response to emotional imagery of social contexts

The study examined self-reported emotion and facial muscle and autonomic activity of depressed and nondepressed men in response to the social context of emotional situations. 20 university men, assessed on the Beck Depression Inventory, were asked to imagine happy and sad situations with and without visualizing other people. No differences were found between men classified as depressed and nondepressed on self-reported emotion and facial muscle activity. Smiling did not show differences between social contexts although self-reported happiness was increased during happy-social compared to happy-solitary imagery. Adjusting smiling for social context differences in happiness showed less smiling during happy-social than during happy-solitary imagery. In contrast, self-reported sadness and frowning were greater during sad-social compared to sad-solitary imagery. No differences between social contexts were found when frowning was adjusted for social context differences in sadness. Depressed-scoring men showed higher mean heart rate during sad-social than sad-solitary imagery whereas nondepressed-scoring men showed higher mean heart rate during happy social compared to happy-solitary imagery. The results indicate that men may frown more when sad but generally do not smile more during happy-social imagery, independent of depression. Depressed mood may affect heart rate during sad imagery but may not alter facial muscle activity and self:reported emotion in men.     

Relations between emotions,display rules,social motives,and facial behaviour

We report research on the relations between emotions, display rules, social motives, and facial behaviour. In Study 1 we used a questionnaire methodology to examine how respondents would react to a funny or a not funny joke told to them by a close friend or a stranger. We assessed display rules and motivations for smiling and/or laughing. Display rules and social motives (partly) mediated the relationship between the experimental manipulations and self‐reported facial behaviour. Study 2 was a laboratory experiment in which funny or not funny jokes were told to participants by a male or female stranger. Consistent with hypotheses, hearing a funny joke evoked a stronger motivation to share positive affect by showing longer Duchenne smiling. Contrary to hypotheses, a not funny joke did not elicit greater prosocial motivation by showing longer “polite” smiling, although such a smiling pattern did occur. Rated funniness of the joke and the motivation to share positive affect mediated the relationship between the joke manipulation and facial behaviour. Path analysis was used to explore this mediating process in greater detail.     

哭泣表情面孔的注意偏向:眼动的证据

研究采用双选择Oddball范式和线索-靶子范式,并结合眼动技术,以微笑、哭泣和中性表情面孔为刺激材料,综合考察哭泣表情面孔在识别和解离过程中的注意偏向。研究发现:在识别阶段,哭泣表情面孔的识别正确率和反应速度都显著优于微笑表情面孔,进一步的兴趣区注视偏向分析发现,哭泣和微笑表情面孔的注视模式既具有一致的规律,又存在细微的差异;在解离阶段,返回抑制受线索表情类型的影响,在有效线索条件下,哭泣表情线索呈现后个体对目标刺激的平均注视时间和眼跳潜伏期都显著短于其它表情线索。表明哭泣表情面孔在识别和解离过程中具有不同的注意偏向表现,在识别阶段表现为反应输出优势和注视模式上的一致性与差异性;在解离阶段表现为有效线索条件下,对目标刺激定位和视觉加工的促进作用。     

情绪背景对面部表情识别的影响及其作用机制

正确识别面部表情对成功的社会交往有重要意义。面部表情识别受到情绪背景的影响。本文首先介绍了情绪背景对面部表情识别的增强作用,主要表现为视觉通道的情绪一致性效应和跨通道情绪整合效应;然后介绍了情绪背景对面部表情识别的阻碍作用,主要表现为情绪冲突效应和语义阻碍效应;接着介绍了情绪背景对中性和歧义面孔识别的影响,主要表现为背景的情绪诱发效应和阈下情绪启动效应;最后对现有研究进行了总结分析,提出了未来研究的建议。     

Implicit need for affiliation is associated with increased corrugator activity in a non-positive, but not in a positive social interaction

Affective changes in response to motive-relevant stimuli are a defining feature of implicit motives. We therefore expected to find an effect of individual differences in the implicit need for affiliation (nAff) on corrugator supercilii activity, an indicator of affect, when participants were confronted with nonverbal indicators of a conversational partner’s withdrawal. Participants’ nAff was assessed with a Picture Story Exercise (PSE). They were then involved in an interaction with a smiling or a neutral experimenter while their corrugator activity was measured with electromyography (EMG). As expected, we found higher corrugator activity for people high in nAff compared to people low in nAff when the experimenter kept a neutral facial expression throughout the interaction but not when he/she was smiling.     

Automatic mimicry reactions as related to differences in emotional empathy

The hypotheses of this investigation were derived by conceiving of automatic mimicking as a component of emotional empathy. Differences between subjects high and low in emotional empathy were investigated. The parameters compared were facial mimicry reactions, as represented by electromyographic (EMG) activity when subjects were exposed to pictures of angry or happy faces, and the degree of correspondence between subjects' facial EMG reactions and their self-reported feelings. The comparisons were made at different stimulus exposure times in order to elicit reactions at different levels of information processing. The high-empathy subjects were found to have a higher degree of mimicking behavior than the low-empathy subjects, a difference that emerged at short exposure times (17-40 ms) that represented automatic reactions. The low-empathy subjects tended already at short exposure times (17-40 ms) to show inverse zygomaticus muscle reactions, namely "smiling" when exposed to an angry face. The high-empathy group was characterized by a significantly higher correspondence between facial expressions and self-reported feelings. No differences were found between the high- and low-empathy subjects in their verbally reported feelings when presented a happy or an angry face. Thus, the differences between the groups in emotional empathy appeared to be related to differences in automatic somatic reactions to facial stimuli rather than to differences in their conscious interpretation of the emotional situation.     

Effect-based control of facial expressions: evidence from action-effect compatibility

Facial expressions such as smiling or frowning are normally followed by, and often aim at, the observation of corresponding facial expressions in social counterparts. Given this contingency between one’s own and other persons’ facial expressions, the production of such facial actions might be the subject of so-called action–effect compatibility effects. In the present Experiment 1, we confirmed this assumption. Participants were required to smile or frown. The generation of these expressions was harder when participants produced predictable feedback from a virtual counterpart that was incompatible with their own facial expression; for example, smiling produced the presentation of a frowning face. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that this effect vanishes with inverted faces as action feedback, which shows that the phenomenon is bound to the instantaneous emotional interpretation of the feedback. These results comply with the assumption that the generation of facial expressions is controlled by an anticipation of these expressions’ effects in the social environment.     

What do facial expressions convey: feeling states,behavioral intentions,or action requests?

Emotion theorists assume certain facial displays to convey information about the expresser's emotional state. In contrast, behavioral ecologists assume them to indicate behavioral intentions or action requests. To test these contrasting positions, over 2,000 online participants were presented with facial expressions and asked what they revealed-feeling states, behavioral intentions, or action requests. The majority of the observers chose feeling states as the message of facial expressions of disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, and surprise, supporting the emotions view. Only the anger display tended to elicit more choices of behavioral intention or action request, partially supporting the behavioral ecology view. The results support the view that facial expressions communicate emotions, with emotions being multicomponential phenomena that comprise feelings, intentions, and wishes.     

Dismissing-avoidant pattern of attachment and mimicry reactions at different levels of information processing

Individuals with a dismissing-avoidant pattern of attachment are assumed to repress anxiety-related signals, a disposition hypothesized to interfere with facial mimicry and emotional contagion. Further, they are assumed to have one internal working model associated with anxiety, operating out of awareness at early, automatic stages of information processing, and another positive model operating at later, cognitively controlled stages of processing. The main aim of the present investigation was to compare facial mimicry in dismissing-avoidant and non-dismissing subjects at different levels of information processing. Pictures of happy and angry faces were exposed to 61 subjects at three different exposure times (17, 56, and 2,350 ms) in order to elicit facial muscle reactions, first at automatic levels and then at a more controlled levels. Corrugator activity ("frowning muscles") represented negative emotions and zygomaticus activity ("smiling muscles") positive emotions. The dismissing-avoidant subjects scored significantly lower on emotional empathy than the non-dismissing subjects. At the automatic level the dismissing-avoidant subjects showed "normal" corrugator responses (negative emotions) upon exposure to angry faces. At the cognitively controlled level of processing (2,350 ms) a significant interaction effect was shown between Faces x Muscles x Attachment pattern. The dismissing-avoidant subjects showed no corrugator response and an increased zygomaticus response ("smiling reaction") to the angry face, whereas the non-dismissing subjects reacted with a significant mimicking reaction. The dismissing-avoidant subjects' tendency to "smiling" in response to the angry face at the controlled level (2,350 ms) may be interpreted as a repression of their earlier, automatically evoked (56 ms) negative emotional reaction.     

Smiles make it easier and so do frowns: masked affective stimuli influence mental effort

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that exposure to masked emotional expressions during the performance of cognitive tasks influences effort mobilization. In support of the predictions, participants who processed masked sad faces during task performance under "do your best" instructions showed stronger sympathetic nervous system discharge to the heart (shorter pre-ejection period, higher systolic blood pressure) than participants who were exposed to masked smiling faces or angry faces. Assessed task appraisals suggest that these effects on effort-related cardiovascular reactivity occurred because the masked emotional stimuli influenced the level of experienced task difficulty. The findings are compatible with the effects of consciously experienced affect on effort-related cardiovascular response.     

阈下情绪STROOP效应发展特点

随机选取5,6,7岁儿童和成人被试共163名完成阈下情绪STROOP实验,以揭示情绪-认知动态发展关系。结果发现阈下情绪STROOP效应表现出随着年龄增长逐渐减弱以至消失的趋势：5岁儿童在哭表情图片条件下颜色命名反应时显著长于中性表情图片条件,6岁、7岁儿童在笑表情图片条件下对颜色命名错误率显著高于中性表情图片条件,成人没有表现出显著的情绪STROOP效应。因此得出结论,个体情绪STROOP效应大小可以反映其情绪控制能力的高低;积极和消极情绪引起的情绪STROOP效应具有不同的表现形式和心理产生机制     

Exploring emotional and cognitive conflict using speeded voluntary facial expressions

Affective conflict and control may have important parallels to cognitive conflict and control, but these processes have been difficult to quantitatively study with emotionally naturalistic laboratory paradigms. The current study examines a modification of the AX-Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT), a well-validated probe of cognitive conflict and control, for the study of emotional conflict. In the Emotional AX-CPT, speeded emotional facial expressions measured with electromyography (EMG) were used as the primary response modality, and index of emotional conflict. Bottom-up emotional conflict occurred on trials in which precued facial expressions were incongruent with the valence of an emotionally evocative picture probe (e.g., smiling to a negative picture). A second form of top-down conflict occurred in which the facial expression and picture probe were congruent, but the opposite expression was expected based on the precue. A matched version of the task was also performed (in a separate group of participants) with affectively neutral probe stimuli. Behavioral interference was observed, in terms of response latencies and errors, on all conflict trials. However, bottom-up conflict was stronger in the emotional version of the task compared to the neutral version; top-down conflict was similar across the two versions. The results suggest that voluntary facial expressions may be more sensitive to indexing emotional than nonemotional conflict, and importantly, may provide an ecologically valid method of examining how emotional conflict may manifest in behavior and brain activity.     

Enhanced embodied response following ambiguous emotional processing

It has generally been assumed that high-level cognitive and emotional processes are based on amodal conceptual information. In contrast, however, "embodied simulation" theory states that the perception of an emotional signal can trigger a simulation of the related state in the motor, somatosensory, and affective systems. To study the effect of social context on the mimicry effect predicted by the "embodied simulation" theory, we recorded the electromyographic (EMG) activity of participants when looking at emotional facial expressions. We observed an increase in embodied responses when the participants were exposed to a context involving social valence before seeing the emotional facial expressions. An examination of the dynamic EMG activity induced by two socially relevant emotional expressions (namely joy and anger) revealed enhanced EMG responses of the facial muscles associated with the related social prime (either positive or negative). These results are discussed within the general framework of embodiment theory.     

Facial reactions to emotional stimuli: Automatically controlled emotional responses

Based on a model in which the facial muscles can be both automatically/involuntarily controlled and voluntarily controlled by conscious processes, we explore whether spontaneously evoked facial reactions can be evaluated in terms of criteria for what characterises an automatic process. In three experiments subjects were instructed to not react with their facial muscles, or to react as quickly as possible by wrinkling the eyebrows (frowning) or elevating the cheeks (smiling) when exposed to pictures of negative or positive emotional stimuli, while EMG activity was measured from the corrugator supercilii and zygomatic major muscle regions. Consistent with the proposition that facial reactions are automatically controlled, the results showed that the corrugator muscle reaction was facilitated to negative stimuli and the zygomatic muscle reaction was facilitated to positive stimuli. The results further showed that, despite the fact that subjects were required to not react with their facial muscles at all, they could not avoid producing a facial reaction that corresponded to the negative and positive stimuli.     

Emotional and behavioral reactions to social undermining: A closer look at perceived offender motives

This study examined how perceptions of underlying offender motives affect victims’ emotional and behavioral reactions toward their offender. Perceived offender motives of malice and greed were embedded in a cognition–emotion–behavior model based on theories of attribution, forgiveness and revenge, and tested in the context of social undermining. Findings suggested that victims distinguished between offender malice and greed, and that these attributions shaped subsequent emotional reactions, which in turn demonstrated independent relations with revenge, avoidance, and reconciliation.     

Gaze cueing elicited by emotional faces is influenced by affective context

When we observe someone shift their gaze to a peripheral event or object, a corresponding shift in our own attention often follows. This social orienting response, joint attention, has been studied in the laboratory using the gaze cueing paradigm. Here, we investigate the combined influence of the emotional content displayed in two critical components of a joint attention episode: The facial expression of the cue face, and the affective nature of the to-be-localized target object. Hence, we presented participants with happy and disgusted faces as cueing stimuli, and neutral (Experiment 1), pleasant and unpleasant (Experiment 2) pictures as target stimuli. The findings demonstrate an effect of ‘emotional context’ confined to participants viewing pleasant pictures. Specifically, gaze cueing was boosted when the emotion of the gazing face (i.e., happy) matched that of the targets (pleasant). Demonstrating modulation by emotional context highlights the vital flexibility that a successful joint attention system requires in order to assist our navigation of the social world.     

Spontaneous facial expressions of happy bowlers and soccer fans

Kraut and Johnston (1979) found surprisingly few smiles in large samples of bowlers and hockey fans during happy events--unless they were simultaneously engaged in social interaction. A limitation of their studies is that there was no direct test of subjects' actual emotional experience at the moments in which they were observed. This article reports two field studies in which emotions were reported by bowlers and by soccer fans. Analysing facial behaviour of those who reported happiness, we found a low probability of smiling in the absence of social interaction (.09 for bowlers and .07 for soccer fans) and a high probability of smiling during social interaction (.78 and .70). These findings question the common assumption that smiles are an indicator of happiness per se, and support the alternative hypothesis of a more complex and indirect relationship between smiling and happiness.     

群体面孔情绪感知的神经机制

如何揭示情绪性面孔加工的认知神经机制一直是心理学和社会神经科学的热点课题。以往研究主要采用单独面孔表情作为情绪诱发或呈现方式, 但对群体情绪知觉与体验的关注极其缺乏, 而群体面孔表情作为群体情绪的主要表达方式, 亟待深入关注。因此, 本项目将采用群体面孔(面孔群)表情作为群体情绪刺激, 拟通过事件相关电位(ERP)、核磁共振(fMRI)以及经颅磁刺激(TMS)等技术结合行为研究, 尝试从情绪信息(效价和强度)、朝向信息(正面、侧面、倒置)、完整性(局部呈现、完整呈现)、空间频率信息(完整、高频、低频)等方面探明群体面孔表情加工的时间动态特征和大脑激活模式。这将有助于全面认识和深入了解群体情绪识别的一般规律, 对于更好地优化社会互动也具有现实意义。