Professional actors demonstrate variability, not stereotypical expressions, when portraying emotional states in photographs
Abstract
It is long hypothesized that there is a reliable, specific mapping between certain emotional states and the facial movements that express those states. This hypothesis is often tested by asking untrained participants to pose the facial movements they believe they use to express emotions during generic scenarios. Here, we test this hypothesis using, as stimuli, photographs of facial configurations posed by professional actors in response to contextually-rich scenarios. The scenarios portrayed in the photographs were rated by a convenience sample of participants for the extent to which they evoked an instance of 13 emotion categories, and actors’ facial poses were coded for their specific movements. Both unsupervised and supervised machine learning find that in these photographs, the actors portrayed emotional states with variable facial configurations; instances of only three emotion categories (fear, happiness, and surprise) were portrayed with moderate reliability and specificity. The photographs were separately rated by another sample of participants for the extent to which they portrayed an instance of the 13 emotion categories; they were rated when presented alone and when presented with their associated scenarios, revealing that emotion inferences by participants also vary in a context-sensitive manner. Together, these findings suggest that facial movements and perceptions of emotion vary by situation and transcend stereotypes of emotional expressions. Future research may build on these findings by incorporating dynamic stimuli rather than photographs and studying a broader range of cultural contexts.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Aug 19, 2021
- Source ID
- 10.1038/s41467-021-25352-6
Entities
People
- Emery Brown
- Jennifer M. B. Fugate
- Katie Hoemann
- Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Maria Gendron
- Sam H. Lyons
- Tuan Le Mau
Organizations
- Freedom Together Foundation
- National Cancer Institute
- National Eye Institute
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences
- National Institute of Mental Health
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences
- United States Department of Health and Human Services