In this video I discuss how emotions are more than just internal states and that we express them to others and also recognize the expressions of others. We communicate our emotional state to others in a number of ways, including through our speech, tone of voice, eye gaze, posture, and facial expressions. Darwin proposed that emotional expression was universal, and later research by Paul Ekman and others has supported this view. I also describe the facial-feedback hypothesis, which suggests that the expression of an emotion can also serve to strengthen an emotional state.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous videos we’ve been talking about emotions and we’ve been thinking about them mostly as internal states; levels of physiological activity in the body, or cognitive interpretations of situations, but it’s important remember that emotions are not just about internal feelings and this is because we express emotions.

We communicate them to other people and we do this in a number of ways. And we do it in ways that we don’t have full control over. It can be hard to control the expression of your emotional state in some situations. So we express our emotional state through our speech but also through our tone of voice, through our eye gaze, through our posture, and most importantly for this video, through our facial expressions. And so this idea that emotions are also about communication and that we express our emotional state to others, and we recognize the emotional expressions of others, might make us ask how we know how to do this. How is it that we know how to express a particular emotion in a way that someone else will recognize? And how is it that we’re able to recognize the emotional expressions of other people?

So this brings us to the work of Charles Darwin who, in 1872, wrote a book on this subject “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” and what Darwin proposed is known as the “universality hypothesis” and this is the idea that emotions are expressed in the same way; that this is innate, that we don’t have to learn it through experience but that we’re born knowing how to express certain emotions and how to recognize certain emotional expressions. And the idea is this would offer a survival advantage, right?

This would be the evolutionary explanation for where these emotional expressions are coming from. That if you can recognize anger on another person’s face or if you can clearly express your friendliness to another person, that this is going to offer you a survival advantage. And Darwin thought we could also see this in animals; that we could recognize the emotional states of animals just by observing their expressions. So we might be able to tell that you know an animal is angry or afraid and that being able to do this would be pretty useful. And, of course, that we could also recognize emotional expressions on people’s faces.

Now, Darwin’s idea of universality was kind of forgotten for a while and part of the reason for this is the dominance of the behaviorist approach in psychology which is all about experience and learning. So the behaviorist explanation for “why do people smile when they’re happy?” would probably go something like “well, you get reinforced for smiling, so mom smiles at you and then you imitate this, you copy this behavior, and then mom rewards you for smiling and so this encourages this behavior to be repeated in the future” and that would be sort of the behaviorist explanation for “why is it that people smile when they’re happy?”. That it would all be about learning and your experience in the world.

Now in the 1960s Paul Ekman did some research supporting Darwin’s view and suggesting that it wasn’t about learning and it wasn’t about, you know, the society that you were raised in, it was universal. He thought that there were six basic emotions that people all over the globe could recognize and could express. And one of the ways that he did this was he went to an isolated tribe. He went to the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, and the reason he wanted to go to an isolated tribe was people suggested “well, you know you have so much exposure, you watch movies and TV, and you see billboards and magazines, and you see people all smiling when they’re supposed to be happy and you see them, you know, frowning and pouting when they’re looking sad and so you have all this experience that you aren’t, you don’t really even realize, and that sort of becomes a part of your emotional expression.”

But if you find an isolated tribe that doesn’t have exposure to all of this media and they express emotions in the same way, then that would suggest that it’s more universal. So Ekman went to this Fore tribe and he did things like show people pictures and ask them, you know, “one of these people here, someone has just died, which which face do you think goes with that?”. And he found they picked the same face that we might pick, right? Of somebody looking sad, and this would suggest that they recognized the expression of sadness in the same way. And so these six basic emotions that Ekman proposed were; joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust.

And here’s a picture that’s in just about every introductory psychology textbook which is these photos that Ekman made demonstrating these basic emotions. So here you can see anger, fear, disgust, surprise, joy, and sadness. Now, a note I should make here is some criticism of this. It’s important to remember that these photos are actually staged photos; these are not authentic expressions of these emotions. And so we might think of them as almost being caricatures of the emotions and so the fact that people can readily recognize these doesn’t necessarily indicate the best, you know, always how somebody expresses this emotion. And there’s obviously a bit more subtlety and nuance going on here then you might get from these staged photos. But that’s kind of a minor point, but it’s something that you can think about if you’re interested in emotions.

And other evidence for this universality hypothesis is not that, not just that other you know isolated tribes seem to express emotions in the same way but also that we see people who are congenitally blind and they smile when they’re happy and yet they’ve never seen anyone else smile. Or we can look for expression through posture. So some studies have looked at athletes who are blind and when they win a competition what do they do? You know, they stand up straight and they hold their arms in the air, and again they’ve never seen somebody do that. And what do they do when they lose? You know, they slump their shoulders, and they drop their head and this suggests that it’s something innate that’s going on and it’s not something that’s learned through experience.

Now, I think another way we can see this is through the use of emoticons online. So people are communicating with people all over the world and emoticons generally seem to be fairly easy to understand, right? People can use a smiley face to suggest that they’re happy and that’s generally I think pretty clear, and this is a bit different from the use of emojis. So emojis are these picture characters and these can include things that aren’t necessarily universal. So things like hand gestures are not universal. You can find the same hand gesture in different cultures can mean very different things and so you know this sort of thumbs up symbol here might not be easily understood all over the world. And, you know, other pictures like a birthday cake, you know, if you have an emoji of a birthday cake well that’s obviously very culturally specific. Other people may have no idea what that is because they don’t have any experience with that. So I think that’s another place we can see a distinction between things that are more universal like faces representing certain emotions, and things that are more culturally specific.

The last thing I’ll say about facial expressions is the idea that our facial expressions might influence our emotional state. In other words, that putting on a happy face might actually make you feel happier. So this is known as the “facial feedback hypothesis” and this is the idea that emotions can be self reinforcing and that the expression of an emotion can actually influence your emotional state. Now I have to be careful here because this is sort of a textbook example of this facial feedback hypothesis and just last year in 2016 there was a paper looking at attempted replications of this study and unfortunately we weren’t able to replicate it.

So I suggest that maybe it’s not as clear as we previously thought, but this famous study by a researcher named Fritz Strack had participants hold a pen in their mouth. And so they held the pen in one of two ways: in one case they use their teeth to hold the pen, they did something like this and the idea is that forces you to pull your lips back in a sort of pseudo smile without the researchers asking you to smile because that one might sort of give away that they’re interested in emotional states. And so, you know, you’re holding the pen and you’re looking at comics, I think they used Far Side comics by Gary Larson and the idea is, you know, would people find the comics funnier, would they feel happier if they held the pen like this, compared to other participants who held the pen in a similar way but they did it using their lips? So they had to purse their lips into the sort of this pout or sort of almost frown-like face.

And so the idea is, if they’re adopting this emotional expression, which again it’s not really an emotional expression, they’re adopting this pattern of facial movements, that maybe they would find the comics less funny. They would be in the less happy mood while they’re doing this task and that was what Fritz Strack and colleagues originally found. As I said there’s been some failures to replicate this, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s not something to this facial feedback. So other researchers have done other types of tests for this and have suggested that maybe there is this relationship between expression and how you feel.

So another example of this comes from studies where people had Botox injections and so this essentially paralyzes certain muscles in the face from being able to move and some studies have found that people who have had Botox injections actually show reduced emotional responses in some situations. That may be because they’re not able to express the emotion and therefore they’re not getting this feedback from the facial muscles and therefore the emotion is not being experienced quite as strongly. Now as for, you know, the full conclusion on what to make of the facial feedback hypothesis, I don’t know yet. And we don’t know and we’ll see where it goes but it’s certainly something that’s worth thinking about. Ok, so in the next video we’ll look at facial expressions in a little more detail. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!