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Emotionshaping: a situated perspective on emotionreading

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Abstract

Can we read emotions in faces? Many studies suggest that we can, yet skeptics contend that these studies employ methods that unwittingly help subjects in matching faces with emotions. Some studies present subjects with posed faces, which may be more exaggerated than spontaneous ones. And some studies provide subjects with a list of emotion words to choose from, which forces them to interpret faces in specific emotion terms. I argue that the skeptics’ challenge rests on a false assumption: that once subjects leave the lab, they no longer receive help in matching faces with emotions. I contend that people receive as much help in the wild as they do in the lab. People unconsciously amplify their spontaneous expressions in the presence of others, thereby making them easier to read. And people teach children to interpret faces in the same specific emotion terms found in the experimenters’ word lists. I argue that we are good at readings emotions in faces because we can normally count on a little help from our friends.

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Notes

  1. I define my terms later in the paper. As a preview, I define “emotionreading” as the process of rapidly and reliably associating faces (or other behaviors) with emotions. These associations need not be correct.

  2. Most subjects from the U.S., Japan, and Brazil also labeled the same faces as afraid and surprised, but many subjects from New Guinea and Borneo reversed these labels. There was also less agreement as to which faces correspond to disgust.

  3. A classic case for emotionreading is found in Darwin (1872, 358–359). A contemporary classic is Ekman (1992). Matsumoto et al. (2008) and Montague and Walker-Andrews (2001) report experimental results that bolster Darwin’s and Ekman’s arguments.

  4. Naab & Russell observe that “posed expressions were created with the sole purpose of conveying a single specific emotion, typically with exaggerated individual features,” (2007, 736). Barrett adds that “In real life, faces and bodies don’t move in this cartoonish fashion” (2020). Gendron et al. suggest that “To address this concern, it is instructive to compare emotion perception based on covertly acquired spontaneous facial actions…with actions that are posed” (2013, 47). Indeed, some studies that feature spontaneous faces find substantially lower agreement than studies featuring posed faces (e.g. Naab and Russell 2007).

  5. Aviezer et al. (2011) took a photograph of a facial expression of disgust and superimposed it onto photographs of bodies performing gestures indicative of different emotions. Subjects were instructed to ignore the gestures and to focus solely on the facial expressions. Yet, when the disgust face was superimposed onto bodies performing fearful, sad, and angry gestures, subjects were less likely to match the face with disgust, and more likely to match it with the emotion indicated by the gestures. This study suggests that context influences the interpretation of faces.

  6. An alternative to the judgment task—in which subjects are presented with photographs of faces and asked to label them with emotion words—is the sorting task—in which subjects are given photographs of faces and asked to sort them into different piles, based on whatever similarities strike them as most salient. Gendron et al. (2014) found that whereas U.S. subjects tend to sort faces by emotion, Himba subjects from Namibia tend to sort faces in behavioral or situational terms.

  7. Griffiths and Scarantino (2009) develop a situated perspective on emotion. I develop a situated perspective on emotionreading. I compare these two perspectives in the final section of the paper.

  8. I limit my focus to present-tense attributions of emotion, but emotion attributions can also be past- or future-tense (“Tom was sad” or “Tom will be sad”), as well as counterfactual (“Tom would be sad”).

  9. Gallagher and Zahavi (2012) and Glazer (2018), among others, have argued that some expressions do provide us with direct access to others’ feelings.

  10. The emotionreading hypothesis should not be taken to imply that emotions are the only states we associate with faces. Faces have myriad meanings, many unrelated to emotion. The claim that we are natural emotionreaders is consistent with the claim that we also read intentions, beliefs, and other states in faces.

  11. Jack et al. (2014) find that some expressions take longer to read because they involve a more complex set of movements. That may be why it takes longer to discern anger in a face than a dog in a photograph.

  12. A question that has occupied psychologists for the last century is whether associations between faces and emotions are universal, culturally specific, or perhaps even more individualized. If you were to show a photograph of a face to people all around the globe, would they tend to think of the same emotion? Let’s say that emotionreading is convergent to the extent that people associate the same faces with the same emotions and divergent to the extent that people associate the same faces with different emotions. Although we can make sense of the idea of divergent emotionreading, let’s stipulate that by “emotionreading” we mean convergent emotionreading. Thus, if people from different cultures classify faces differently, then they are not classifying faces on the basis of emotionreading—but on the basis of some other cognitive process.

  13. See also Tormey (1971, 43), Bar-On (2004, 315), Taylor (1979, 74), Smith (2015, 274), and Glazer (2017, 3620).

  14. Many Constructionists agree that some faces are characteristic components of emotions, and that these faces express those emotions. They claim, however, that the emotion is psychologically and/or socially constructed. See Glazer (2018) for a critical discussion of this view.

  15. Park et al. (2020) report that while posed and spontaneous faces can be distinguished physiologically, each involves some muscles being contracted more intensely than the other. Posed faces tend to involve greater contractions of lower-face muscles, while spontaneous faces tend to involve greater contractions of upper-face muscles.

  16. Research finds that the left side of the face is generally more expressive than the right. This asymmetry is found in both spontaneous and posed faces (Dopson et al. 1984). My point here is that amplified spontaneous expressions are less asymmetrical than non-amplified spontaneous expressions.

  17. I thank an anonymous referee for bringing this worry to my attention.

  18. By “contextual cues” I mean any additional information that accompanies the facial expression, construed narrowly as a set of muscle contractions, which might influence the observer’s interpretation of the expression. Wieser and Brosch (2012) helpfully group contextual cues into four categories—within-face features (e.g., eye gaze), within-sender features (e.g., hand gestures), external features (e.g. visual scene), and within-perceiver features (e.g., racial bias)—and review existing research on each. This research program is still in its infancy; important empirical and conceptual work remains to be done.

  19. Context can be ambiguous in the same way that faces can. Grieving people visit cemeteries, but so do tourists. In some circumstances, the context may help observers to disambiguate faces. But in others, faces may help observers to disambiguate contexts.

  20. Smith in fact uses the term “sympathy,” but he has in mind what we mean by “empathy,” namely the sharing of feeling.

  21. Suri & Gross are careful to describe emotion regulation in a way that is consistent with competing theories of emotion. Their research does not assume or support any particular theory.

  22. This idea is controversial. Famously, the finding that performing a “power stance” can temporarily boost one’s confidence (Carney et al. 2010) seems to have failed attempts at replication.

  23. Hochschild (1983) argues that employees in the service industry do not merely engage in “surface acting,” producing socially expected expressions without having the corresponding emotions, but regularly engage in “deep acting,” producing the socially expected expression by up-regulating the corresponding emotion. Van Kleef (2016, 69–70, 150–153) discusses several empirical studies that support Hochschild’s claim.

  24. I would like to thank Michael Roche and an anonymous referee for bringing this objection to my attention.

  25. To be clear, sorting faces by emotion is not more “correct” than sorting faces by behavior. Faces have multiple meanings. Prompting subjects from different cultures to sort faces by social intention may result in similar piles, too.

  26. This is not to say that the piles were identical. Most noticeably, Himba participants did not place the disgust faces into a single pile, but rather distributed them among four of the six piles. If one were to remove the disgust faces, however, then the piles would look even more similar to those produced by U.S. participants. Indeed, Widen and Russell (2010b; Lawrence et al. (2016) find that the ability to distinguish disgust faces from other faces develops later in life, and is influenced by cultural norms related to disgust. So it is not too surprising that disgust would be the emotion that most defies the predicted categorizations.

  27. I thank an anonymous referee for raising this concern.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Dayton, 300 College Park, 45469, Dayton, OH, USA

    Trip Glazer

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Glazer, T. Emotionshaping: a situated perspective on emotionreading. Biol Philos 37, 13 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-022-09842-5

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