Emotions

1. Emotions By: Stephanie Lynn Martella Psychology 1010

2. Communicative Expression • Emotional Expression is an observable sign of an emotional state. • Example: Loudness and duration of one’s voice, one’s gaze, posture, or touch can also clue someone in on one’s emotions. • People are walking, talking advertisements for what’s going on inside the mind. • One’s face gives away the most emotion though. • There are 43 muscles in the face that can create 10,000 unique configurations.

3. Communicative Expression Cont.… • Psychologists Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen spent years studying facial movement. • Isolated 46 unique movements called action units • Example: “cheek puffer”, “Dimpler”, happy emotion= zygomatic major and obicularis oculi produce a unique facial expression we know as smiling.

4. Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin noticed that animals and humans share some of the same facial expressions. He suggested that facial expressions are a means by which organisms communicate information about their internal states to each other. • Emotional expression is a bit like words or phrases of a nonverbal language. • Developed the Universality hypothesis, which is that emotional expressions have the same meaning for everyone. • Example: We can judge emotional expression from someone of another culture speaking a different language. • Blind people make the same facial expressions as everyone else without even seeing them before. • Babies make facial expressions as well. • Anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise are universal emotions.

5. The Facial Feedback Hypothesis • Suggests that emotional expressions can cause the emotional experiences they signify. • Example: Causing the zygomatic major to move as if you were smiling can actually make you feel happier.

6. Facial Feedback Hypothesis Cont.… • The movement of the zygomatic major causing someone to feel happier is believed to be caused by brain temperature changing from muscle contractions in the face which brings a pleasant affective state. • Researchers have studied one’s emotions by mimicking the person they’re watching to reveal their emotional state. • Example: If the person they were watching were to lean forward and smile then the researcher would as well, causing them to feel the same emotional state. • Emotional expression plays an important role in both sending and receiving information.

7. Deceptive Expression • We can control the muscles in our face so we don’t always have to express the emotions we feel or feel the emotions we display.

8. Display Rules for Deceptive Expression Display rules are norms for the control of emotional expression. • Intensification: exaggerating the expression of one’s emotion. • Example: Pretending to be more surprised by a gift than you really are. • Deintensification: Muting the expression of one’s emotion. • Example: Losing a contest that was really important to you, you hide how disappointed you really are. • Masking: Expressing one emotion while feeling another. • Example: Poker face • Neutralizing: Feeling an emotion but displaying no expression. • Example: Many Asian societies have a strong cultural norm against displaying negative emotions in the presence of a respected person, so they mask or neutralize their expressions.

9. Sincere Emotional Expressions • There are four sets of features that can allow a careful observer to tell whether our emotional expressions are sincere. • Morphology: Certain facial muscles tend to resist conscious control. • Example: With smiling we can force the zygomatic major but not the ocularis oculi. • Symmetry: Sincere expressions are a bit more symmetrical than insincere expressions. • Example: Lopsided smiles are usually insincere. • Duration: Sincere expressions tend to last between a half second and five seconds. Shorter or longer than that is most likely an insincere expression. • Temporal Patterning: Sincere expressions appear and disappear smoothly over a few seconds, insincere expressions have a more abrupt onset and offset.