

Princeton University researchers report in Science that facial expressions can be ambiguous and subjective when viewed independently. The researchers asked study participants to determine from photographs if people were experiencing feelings such as loss, victory, or pain from facial expressions or body language alone, or from both. In some cases, a facial expression associated with one emotion was paired with a body experiencing the opposite emotion.


"We find that extremely positive and extremely negative emotions are maximally indistinctive," says Todorov, who worked with first author Hillel Aviezer, a psychology professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem who conducted the work as a postdoctoral researcher under Todorov, and Yaacov Trope, a psychology professor at New York University.

"People can't tell the difference, although they think they can," Todorov says. "Subjectively people think they can tell the difference, but objectively they are totally at [random] chance of determining correctly. The message of this research is that there is a lot of information in body language people aren't necessarily aware of."

The paper in Science counters popular theories holding that facial expressions are universally consistent indicators of emotion. The most prominent, Todorov says, have been developed by psychologist and University of California-San Francisco professor emeritus Paul Ekman, whose work was fictionalized in the television series "Lie to Me."

Instead, facial movements may be "much blurrier" than those theories account for, Todorov says. In particular, he and his colleagues suggest that when emotions reach a certain intensity, the intricacies of facial expressions become lost, similar to "increasing the volume on stereo speakers to the point that it becomes completely distorted," he says.

"There's much more ambiguity in the face than we assume there is," Todorov says. "We assume that the face conveys whatever is in the person's mind, that we can recognize their emotions. But that's not necessarily true. If we remove all the other contextual clues, we might not be so good at picking out emotional cues."

Jamin Halberstadt, a psychology professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand, says that the work demonstrates in a new way that the physical cues of emotion are more varied and dependent on the emotion felt than predominating theories suggest. Halberstadt is familiar with the Princeton research but had no role it.

Based on theories of facial expression, one would intuit that intense emotions would be even easier to interpret from the face than subtle emotions, says Halberstadt, who studies cognitive-emotion interactions. Yet the research by Todorov, Aviezer and Trope demonstrates that facial movements at some point become secondary to the body.



"This study really questions the primacy of the face in emotion," Halberstadt says. "Real emotional expressions are much more ambiguous, subtle, and malleable than you would think from the research. Any application of emotion theory that relies on or assumes that emotional expressions reside primarily in the face should be under reconsideration from this kind of study."


Yet, these respondents also exhibited a high degree of illusory facial affect: 53% of people who saw the body-and-face photos said they relied on the face. Of a group for whom the pictures were described but not shown, 80% said they would rely solely on the face when determining the emotion pictured, while 20% they would look to the face and the body together. No one indicated they would judge by body language alone.




If anything, Todorov says, the findings promote a more holistic view of understanding how people physically communicate feelings.


"There are lots of cues that help us in the social environment, but we often think the face has this special status, that we can tell so much from it," he says. "In reality it tells us much less than we think."

Source: Princeton University