Abstract
According to psychological models as well as common intuition, intense positive and negative situations evoke highly distinct emotional expressions. Nevertheless, recent work has shown that when judging isolated faces, the affective valence of winning and losing professional tennis players is hard to differentiate. However, expressions produced by professional athletes during publicly broadcasted sports events may be strategically controlled. To shed light on this matter we examined if ordinary people's spontaneous facial expressions evoked during highly intense situations are diagnostic for the situational valence. In Experiment 1 we compared reactions with highly intense positive situations (surprise soldier reunions) versus highly intense negative situations (terror attacks). In Experiment 2, we turned to children and compared facial reactions with highly positive situations (e.g., a child receiving a surprise trip to Disneyland) versus highly negative situations (e.g., a child discovering her parents ate up all her Halloween candy). The results demonstrate that facial expressions of both adults and children are often not diagnostic for the valence of the situation. These findings demonstrate the ambiguity of extreme facial expressions and highlight the importance of context in everyday emotion perception.
Original language | American English |
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Pages (from-to) | 807-814 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Emotion |
Volume | 16 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Sep 2016 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by an Israel Science Foundation (ISF 1140/13) grant to Hillel Aviezer, by an EU Career Integration (EU-CIG 618597) grant to Hillel Aviezer and by a Minerva Fellowship to Sofia Wenzler.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 American Psychological Association.
Keywords
- Arousal
- Intense facial expressions
- Spontaneous expressions
- Valence