Reduced willingness to approach genuine smilers in social anxiety explained by potential for social evaluation,not misperception of smile authenticity

ABSTRACT

We investigate perception of, and responses to, facial expression authenticity for the first time in social anxiety, testing genuine and polite smiles. Experiment 1 (N?=?141) found perception of smile authenticity was unaffected, but that approach ratings, which are known to be reduced in social anxiety for happy faces, are more strongly reduced for genuine than polite smiles. Moreover, we found an independent contribution of social anxiety to approach ratings, over and above general negative affect (state/trait anxiety, depression), only for genuine smiles, and not for polite ones. We argue this pattern of results can be explained by genuine smilers signalling greater potential for interaction – and thus greater potential for the scrutiny that is feared in social anxiety – than polite smiles. Experiment 2 established that, relative to polite smilers, genuine smilers are indeed perceived as friendlier and likely to want to talk for longer if approached. Critically, the degree to which individual face items were perceived as wanting to interact correlated strongly with the amount that social anxiety reduced willingness to approach in Experiment 1. We conclude it is the potential for social evaluation and scrutiny signalled by happy expressions, rather than their positive valence, that is important in social anxiety.     

When the face reveals what words do not: facial expressions of emotion,smiling, and the willingness to disclose childhood sexual abuse

For survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), verbal disclosure is often complex and painful. The authors examined the voluntary disclosure-nondisclosure of CSA in relation to nonverbal expressions of emotion in the face. Consistent with hypotheses derived from recent theorizing about the moral nature of emotion, CSA survivors who did not voluntarily disclose CSA showed greater facial expressions of shame, whereas CSA survivors who voluntarily disclosed CSA expressed greater disgust. Expressions of disgust also signaled sexual abuse accompanied by violence. Consistent with recent theorizing about smiling behavior, CSA nondisclosers made more polite smiles, whereas nonabused participants expressed greater genuine positive emotion. Discussion addressed the implications of these findings for the study of disclosure of traumatic events, facial expression, and the links between morality and emotion.     

基于动态特征的真伪笑容表达与识别

笑容是人类最普遍、最频繁的表情。人类进化出伪装笑容的能力,也拥有部分识别伪装的能力。在表情的表达与识别上,动态信息起着重要的作用。一方面,笑容表达的动态特征可能为区分真伪笑容提供重要的信息,所以我们拟借助近年发展的计算机视觉的特征提取技术,系统地量化分析真伪笑容的动态特征(时长、方向、速度、流畅性、运动对称性、不同部位同步性、头动模式等),考察笑容在不同伪装方式及不同情境下的区别与一致性,深入理解人类笑容表达的特点。另一方面,通过探索有效动态特征与正确识别率的关系,检验知觉-注意假说,了解真伪笑容的识别特点及研究识别机制。通过比较动态真伪笑容的表达特点与识别特点,进一步理解人类表情信号编码与解码之间的关系。     

Who is approachable?

The consequences of social interaction can be variable, sometimes harmful, but often rewarding. The adaptive social perceiver must therefore determine which interactions are worthwhile pursuing and which are not. The present research investigated whether subtle but meaningful differences in facial expressions are perceived in terms of the affordance of approachability. Participants engaged in simulated social encounters with targets displaying enjoyment smiles, non-enjoyment smiles or neutral expressions while fluctuations in their posture were measured. The results indicated systematic differences in perceived approachability as a function of facial expression and target sex. These findings are discussed in terms of the functional coupling between social perception and action with respect to the information that specifies the affordance of approachability.     

Beyond smile dynamics: mimicry and beliefs in judgments of smiles

The judgment that a smile is based on "true," usually positive, feelings affects social interaction. However, the processes underlying the interpretation of a smile as being more or less genuine are not well understood. The aim of the present research was to test predictions of the Simulation of Smiles Model (SIMS) proposed by Niedenthal, Mermillod, Maringer, and Hess (2010). In addition to the perceptual features that can guide the judgment of a smile as genuine, the model identifies the conditions that the judgments rely on: (a) the embodiment of the facial expression and its corresponding state, and (b) beliefs about the situations in which genuine smiles are most often expressed. Results of two studies are consistent with the model in that they confirm the hypotheses that facial mimicry provides feedback that is used to judge the meaning of a smile, and that beliefs about the situations in which a smile occurs guides such judgments when mimicry is inhibited.     

Social preference in rats

Rats were given repeated choices between social and nonsocial outcomes, and between familiar and unfamiliar social outcomes. Lever presses on either of 2 levers in the middle chamber of a 3-chamber apparatus opened a door adjacent to the lever, permitting 45-s access to social interaction with the rat in the chosen side chamber. In Experiment 1, rats preferred (a) social over nonsocial options, choosing their cagemate rat over an empty chamber, and (b) an unfamiliar over a familiar rat, choosing a non-cagemate over their cagemate. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2 with 2 different non-cagemate rats. Rats preferred both non-cagemate rats to a similar degree when pitted against their cagemate, but were indifferent when the 2 non-cagemates were pitted against each other. Similar preference for social over nonsocial and non-cagemate over cagemate was seen in Experiment 3, with new non-cagemate rats introduced after every third session. Response rates (for both cagemate and non-cagemate rats) were elevated under conditions of nonsocial (isolated) housing compared to conditions of social (paired) housing, demonstrating a social deprivation effect. Together, the experiments contribute to an experimental analysis of social preference within a social reinforcement framework, drawing on methods with proven efficacy in the analysis of reinforcement more generally.     

Affective exchanges between young autistic children and their mothers

This study examined autistic children's social behavior, affect, and use of gaze during naturalistic interactions with their mothers. Sixteen autistic children, 30 to 70 months of age, and 16 normal children, matched on receptive language, participated. Children and their mothers were videotaped during three situations: a free-play period, a more structured period during which communicative demand was made on the child, and a face-to-face interaction. In all three situations, autistic and normal children did not differ in the frequency or duration of gaze at mother's face. In the one condition (face-to-face interaction) during which affective expressions were coded, autistic and normal children also were not found to differ significantly in the frequency or duration of smiles displayed, and neither group displayed frowns. However, autistic children were much less likely than normal children to combine their smiles with eye contact in a single act that conveyed communicative intent. Autistic and normal children were not found to differ in the percentages of smiles they displayed to social versus nonsocial events. However, when autistic children's responses to mother's smiles specifically were examined, it was found that they were much less likely to smile in response to mother's smiles than were normal children. Finally, it was found that mothers o f autistic children displayed fewer smiles and were less likely to smile in response to their children's smiles, when compared with mothers o f normal children. These findings suggest that the autistic child's unusual affective behavior may negatively affect the behavior of others.We wish to thank the children and their mothers who participated in this study, and the staff at Division TEACCH at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for their help in recruiting children for the study. Harriet Reingold generously allowed us to videotape the children in her infant observation laboratory at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Cathy Lord provided videotapes of some of the autistic children and their mothers. Mary Evers assisted in data collection. Kerry Hogan assisted in the coding of data; her help is gratefully acknowledged. The study was supported by a grant from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.     

Perceiving emotions: Cueing social categorization processes and attentional control through facial expressions

Individuals spontaneously categorise other people on the basis of their gender, ethnicity and age. But what about the emotions they express? In two studies we tested the hypothesis that facial expressions are similar to other social categories in that they can function as contextual cues to control attention. In Experiment 1 we associated expressions of anger and happiness with specific proportions of congruent/incongruent flanker trials. We also created consistent and inconsistent category members within each of these two general contexts. The results demonstrated that participants exhibited a larger congruency effect when presented with faces in the emotional group associated with a high proportion of congruent trials. Notably, this effect transferred to inconsistent members of the group. In Experiment 2 we replicated the effects with faces depicting true and false smiles. Together these findings provide consistent evidence that individuals spontaneously utilise emotions to categorise others and that such categories determine the allocation of attentional control.     

Sociosexuality and face perception: Unrestricted sexual orientation facilitates sensitivity to female facial cues

Across two studies, sexually unrestricted men and women showed heightened sensitivity to female facial symmetry (a signal of genetic fitness) and female sexual receptivity (happy facial expressions). In Study 1, individuals assessed the attractiveness of male and female targets of varying facial symmetry. Sexually unrestricted men and women, compared to their sexually restricted counterparts, showed a stronger symmetry advantage in attractiveness ratings for female targets, an indication of greater sensitivity to facial symmetry. Study 2 asked participants to discriminate between genuine (Duchenne) and deceptive smiles on both male and female faces. Results indicated that sexually unrestricted men and women, compared to sexually restricted individuals, were better able to discriminate between these actual and deceptive signals of receptivity for female targets. Neither study found any relationship between sociosexual orientation and the perception of male targets. These results suggest that sexually unrestricted individuals are attuned to reproductively-relevant cues in female faces.     

Pleasing frowns, disappointing smiles: an ERP investigation of counterempathy

The biological predisposition to resonate emotionally with another person is regarded as a critical aspect of social interaction. There are, however, situations in which the emotional response to others is discordant with their emotional experience. Using event-related potentials, the present study investigated the neural underpinnings of this phenomenon, termed "counterempathy." Participants played a card game under the belief that they were playing jointly with another player who sat in an adjoining room and whose smiles and frowns in response to winning or losing in the game they could observe on a computer screen. Depending upon the experimental setting, the other player's facial expressions conveyed either of two opposing values to the participant. In the empathic setting, his emotional expressions were congruent with the participant's outcome (win or loss), whereas in the counterempathic setting, they indicated incongruent outcomes. Results revealed a reversed pattern of brain responses to facial expressions between congruent and incongruent conditions at ~170 ms (N170) over the temporal cortex. That is, N170 was sensitive to frowns in the congruent condition and to smiles in the incongruent condition, both indicating losses for the participant. Furthermore, frowns in the incongruent condition yielded larger medial frontal negativity (MFN) over the medial prefrontal cortex, which correlated with the subjective pleasantness about one's own winning in the incongruent condition. These findings demonstrate that (1) counterempathic responses are associated with modulation of early sensory processing of emotional cues, (2) that MFN is sensitive to the detection of another person's loss during positive inequity, and (3) that MFN is associated with a pleasant feeling during positive inequity, which is possibly related to "Schadenfreude."     

不同类型反馈对儿童学习效果的影响及性别差异

儿童阶段是对外部反馈最敏感的阶段。以往研究发现,不同类型反馈（积极/消极反馈）和不同性质的强化物（物质/社会性强化）对儿童学习效果存在交互作用,并且对不同性别儿童的影响有所不同。本研究通过两个实验,采用联结学习范式以考察不同类型反馈对8~10岁儿童学习效果的影响。首先考察了积极反馈和消极反馈对儿童学习效果的影响,进而在积极、消极反馈的基础上加入了物质、社会性强化物,探究物质、社会性强化条件下积极、消极反馈对儿童学习效果影响的性别差异。结果表明,对于8~10岁儿童来说,消极反馈比积极反馈对儿童学习效果的影响更大。并且,物质、社会性强化物对儿童反馈学习效果的影响存在性别差异,对于男孩来说,在物质性强化条件下,消极反馈更能促进其学习;而对于女孩来说,在社会性强化物下,消极反馈更能促进她们的学习。该研究为如何运用反馈促进儿童学习提供了实证依据。     

Cooperative and competitive motives enhance perceptual sensitivity to angry and happy facial expressions

The interdependent motives of cooperation and competition are integral to adaptive social functioning. In three experiments, we provide novel evidence that both cooperation and competition goals enhance perceptual acuity for both angry and happy faces. Experiment 1 found that both cooperative and competitive motives improve perceivers?? ability to discriminate between genuine and deceptive smiles. Experiment 2 revealed that both cooperative and competitive motives improve perceivers?? perceptual sensitivity to subtle differences among happy and angry facial expressions. Finally, Experiment 3 found that the motivated increase in perceptual acuity for happy and angry expressions allows perceivers to overcome the effects of visual noise, relative to unmotivated control participants. Collectively, these results provide novel evidence that the interdependent motives of cooperation and competition can attune visual perception, accentuating the subjectively experienced signal strength of anger and happiness.     

Duchenne smile,emotional experience,and autonomic reactivity: a test of the facial feedback hypothesis

This study examined the modulatory function of Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles on subjective and autonomic components of emotion. Participants were asked to hold a pencil in their mouth to either facilitate or inhibit smiles and were not instructed to contract specific muscles. Five conditions--namely lips pressing, low-level non-Duchenne smiling, high-level non-Duchenne smiling, Duchenne smiling, and control--were produced while participants watched videoclips that were evocative of positive or negative affect. Participants who displayed Duchenne smiles reported more positive experience when pleasant scenes and humorous cartoons were presented. Furthermore, they tended to exhibit different patterns of autonomic arousal when viewing positive scenes. These results support thefacial feedback hypothesis and suggest that facial feedback has more powerful effects when facial configurations represent valid analogs of basic emotional expressions.     

Self-focused attention and personality validation

Previous research has shown that self-focused attention increases resistance to incorrect experimental suggestion about internal bodily states. The generality of this finding was tested in the present experiment for judgements which require more extensive external validation. It was found that false personality feedback was judged as significantly less accurate than genuine feedback under mirror selffocused conditions but not in the absence of a mirror. Explanations in terms of facial feedback, task involvement, social desirability, and self-serving reactions were discussed but these did not adequately account for the data. The results extend previous findings by showing that even where subjects do not have direct access to internal cues, private self-awareness enhances the validity of self-perceptions.     

Some but not all dispreferred turn markers help to interpret scalar terms in polite contexts

In polite contexts, people find it difficult to perceive whether they can derive scalar inferences from what others say (e.g., does “some people hated your idea” mean that not everyone hated it?). Because this uncertainty can lead to costly misunderstandings, it is important to identify the cues people can rely on to solve their interpretative problem. In this article, we consider two such cues: Making a long Pause before the statement, and prefacing the statement with Well. Data from eight experiments show that Pauses are more effective than Wells as cues to scalar inferences in polite contexts—because they appear to give a specific signal to switch expectations in the direction of bad news, whereas Well appears to give a generic signal to make extra processing effort. We consider the applied value of these findings for human–human and human–machine interaction, as well as their implications for the study of reasoning and discourse.     

The neural correlates of social attention: automatic orienting to social and nonsocial cues

Previous evidence suggests that directional social cues (e.g., eye gaze) cause automatic shifts in attention toward gaze direction. It has been proposed that automatic attentional orienting driven by social cues (social orienting) involves a different neural network from automatic orienting driven by nonsocial cues. However, previous neuroimaging studies on social orienting have only compared gaze cues to symbolic cues, which typically engage top-down mechanisms. Therefore, we directly compared the neural activity involved in social orienting to that involved in purely automatic nonsocial orienting. Twenty participants performed a spatial cueing task consisting of social (gaze) cues and automatic nonsocial (peripheral squares) cues presented at short and long stimulus (cue-to-target) onset asynchronies (SOA), while undergoing fMRI. Behaviorally, a facilitation effect was found for both cue types at the short SOA, while an inhibitory effect (inhibition of return: IOR) was found only for nonsocial cues at the long SOA. Imaging results demonstrated that social and nonsocial cues recruited a largely overlapping fronto-parietal network. In addition, social cueing evoked greater activity in occipito-temporal regions at both SOAs, while nonsocial cueing recruited greater subcortical activity, but only for the long SOA (when IOR was found). A control experiment, including central arrow cues, confirmed that the occipito-temporal activity was at least in part due to the social nature of the cue and not simply to the location of presentation (central vs. peripheral). These results suggest an evolutionary trajectory for automatic orienting, from predominantly subcortical mechanisms for nonsocial orienting to predominantly cortical mechanisms for social orienting.     

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.     

Can dogs use vocal intonation as a social referencing cue in an object choice task?

Evidence from the literature indicates that dogs’ choices can be influenced by human-delivered social cues, such as pointing, and pointing combined with facial expression, intonation (i.e., rising and falling voice pitch), and/or words. The present study used an object choice task to investigate whether intonation conveys unique information in the absence of other salient cues. We removed facial expression cues and speech information by delivering cues with the experimenter’s back to the dog and by using nonword vocalizations. During each trial, the dog was presented with pairs of the following three vocal cues: Positive (happy-sounding), Negative (sad-sounding), and Breath (neutral control). In Experiment 1, where dogs received only these vocal cue pairings, dogs preferred the Positive intonation, and there was no difference in choice behavior between Negative or Breath. In Experiment 2, we included a point cue with one of the two vocal cues in each pairing. Here, dogs preferred containers receiving pointing cues as well as Negative intonation, and preference was greatest when both of these cues were presented together. Taken together, these findings indicate that dogs can indeed extract information from vocal intonation alone, and may use intonation as a social referencing cue. However, the effect of intonation on behavior appears to be strongly influenced by the presence of pointing, which is known to be a highly salient visual cue for dogs. It is possible that in the presence of a point cue, intonation may shift from informative to instructive.     

面部表情与捐赠者–受益者关系对网络慈善众筹捐赠行为的影响

网络慈善众筹是从在线社区获得财力捐助的行为。本研究通过3个实验,考察在线社交平台上受益者面部表情与捐赠者–受益者关系对慈善众筹捐赠行为的影响。结果发现,快乐的面部表情对捐赠金额和分享意愿的影响总体上比悲伤更大;捐赠者–受益者共有的熟人关系比陌生人关系对捐赠金额与分享意愿的影响更大;面部表情与捐赠者–受益者关系对慈善众筹的捐赠金额存在交互作用,但对分享意愿没有显著性影响。结果表明,在线社交平台的慈善众筹捐赠行为更偏好有快乐面部表情的受益者,并且更多地受到间接的、社会交换预期微弱的熟人共有关系的影响。