Facial Expression: Predicting and promoting positive outcomes

1. Facial Expression: Predicting and promoting positive outcomes Daniel Messinger, Ph.D.

2. New topics • Emotional Intelligence • Positive Psychology • Psychobiology of morality • Sympathy and empathy • Mother-toddler talk • Emotion work Flight attendants • Averill Messinger

3. Tell me their story Messinger

4. Questions • How might positive emotion and its expression affect life outcomes? • Describe how expressed emotion relates to • Adolescent behavior problems • The course of grieving in widows • Life outcome in college women • What is a functionalist emotion theory? • What is emotion regulation? Messinger

5. Positive Emotion • The Broaden and Build Hypothesis • Positive emotion perceptual and cognitive expansion • Frederickson (1998) • “ positive emotions build personal resources by fostering creative thinking, the readiness to take advantage of opportunities, the strengthening of social bonds, and the undoing of negative emotions.” Harker et al., 2001 Messinger

6. Positive Emotions Trigger Upward Spirals Fredrickson & Joiner (2002) Coping Positive Affect = 5 weeks Messinger

7. One Mechanism: Undoing Messinger

8. Facial expressions and outcomes • Facial expressions • Convey emotion and orientation • Elicit emotion and behavior in others • Social referencing and the visual cliff • Smiling is contagious • But so is scowling Messinger

9. Data • Kindergarten • Adolescent behavior • Bereavement • Year book photos • Discussion of intervention strategies Messinger

10. Kindergarteners’ Family & School Photos • Cross-modality emotional communication  Smile intensity in classroom & home  Warm family touch & smile intensity • in classroom & home  Total family touch & smile intensity, parent’s affect • Child-parent expressive similarity  Father and child smile intensity • Facial emotion display as “thin slice” of temperament?  Smile intensity in classroom (not home) & extraversion ~ Girls’ warm family touch & extraversion Fuccillo • - No significant r’s for effortful control or negative affect

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14. Adolescents • Take an interactive IQ test • Show embarrassment, anger, fear with examiner • Related to teacher ratings of • Externalizing (aggression) • Internalizing (anxiety, withdrawal, somaticizing) Messinger

15. Expressions by behavior rating Why? Keltner et al., 1999 Messinger

16. Recently bereaved • Talk about their loss at 6, 14, & 25 months • Angry facial expressions  Later grief • Duchenne (cheek-raise) laughers  Later • Higher emotional dissociation • Report better association with significant other • Viewed more positively by naïve observers • Why? Messinger

17. Duchenne laughter and recovering from bereavement Keltner et al., 1999 Messinger

18. Yearbook pictures …and life Messinger

19. Smile intensity & other-reported personality Messinger

20. Smile intensity and Observer Expected Interactions (n=114) Messinger

21. Smile intensity and Life Outcomes Messinger

22. Messinger

23. Intervening with children’s emotions Izard: Structural model and intervention

24. In children • Emotion knowledge  Social skills • Unidirectional, .12, • Effect on social preference of others is through social skills • (Mostow et al) • What is emotional intelligence Messinger

25. Emotion communication and understanding in childhood:A real-life problem Saarni

26. Alternative views • Functional • Insight: Recognition of function of emotions and their flexibility in functioning • Regulating emotion to achieve goals • Difficulty: Use goals to interpret behavior but use behavior to infer goals • Dynamic • Insight: Recognition of interfacing role of multiple components in emotional process • Difficulty: Specifying process Messinger

27. Functionalist theory • Emotion is the person’s attempt or readiness to establish, maintain, or change the relation between the person and the environment on matters of significance to that person (Saarni et al., 1998). • Emotion is associated with goal-attainment, social relationships, situational appraisals, action tendencies, self-understanding, self regulation, etc. Messinger

28. Halloween Candy • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOlpdd7y8MI Messinger

29. Critique of functionalism • Definition is overly broad • Circular reasoning • How do you measure goals? • What is a functionalist analysis of emotion in face-to-face play? • Measurement of impact of emotional signal • Similar to ethology Messinger

30. Functionalist views • Emotions come in families defined by these goals • not by facial expression, or brain activity • Messinger’s research is based on families of expressions and emotions • Functional research focus • socialization of emotional experience • acquisition of emotional competence (Saarni), • secondary emotions such as pride. Messinger

31. Emotion regulation • Modifying emotions to attain goals • Sees emotions as • flexible not stereotypical • functional not disruptive • responsive not rigid • E.g., Impulse control, anger modulation, embarrassment, gift receipt. • Flows from functional perspective • See Thompson Messinger

32. Critique of emotion regulation • Inhibition or maintenance/intensification? • Self or other regulation? • What’s emotion and what’s its regulation? • Does functionalism wish to unite concepts? • Is a regulated emotion the same emotion? • Avoid premature judgements of good emotion regulation before we know its normative development and how to measure its adequacy Messinger

33. Emotion regulation • Understanding emotions • Gender socialization • Cultural emotion scripts • Regulation and coping • Empathy vs. sympathy • Dissembling Messinger

34. Themes • Understanding emotions: • Developing complex accounts • Symbolizing internal experience • Self-awareness in guilt and shame • Multiple emotions: sequential and simultaneous Messinger

35. Socialization and scripts • Family rules • High frequency emotion talk • Dysregulation caused by others’ anger and abuse • Boys’ anger; girls’ distress • Empathy vs. sympathy • Dissembling Messinger