Facial Expression of Emotion

Definition

Human beings and some other animals have remarkable control over their facial muscles. Facial expressions of emotion are patterned movements of the muscles in the face that correspond with internal, affective states.

Importance

Communication is clearly important to effective social interaction. Whereas humans are able to communicate with one another verbally, they also are able to communicate nonverbally through body language and facial expressions. Facial expression of emotion is an important aspect of communication, and our bodies and brains seem wired to engage in such communication.

Two aspects of the nervous system highlight the biological readiness to engage in communication through facial expressions. First, human beings appear to have brain regions specifically dedicated to processing information about others' faces. Remarkably, these brain regions are active and developing even in human infants. This suggests that humans are born with a propensity and ability to attend to and process information about other human faces. Second, each human brain has two cortical regions containing a map of one's own body. The somatosensory cortex is the part of the brain that interprets which body part or parts are receiving tactile information at any given time. The more sensitive a particular body part is, the more somatosensory cortex is devoted to it. The motor cortex is the brain region responsible for directing muscle commands to various parts of the body. The more control one has over a particular body part, the more motor cortex is dedicated to that body part. The face is disproportionately represented in both of these cortical regions. That is, there are greater portions of somatosensory and motor cortex dedicated to the face than one might expect based on the size of the face relative to the rest of the human body. All of this suggests that facial expression of emotions serves an important role and that our bodies are equipped to readily communicate through such expression.

Cultural Considerations

Considering the communicative importance of facial expression of emotion, one might speculate that expressions of emotion are universal across cultures—that is, that all human beings make similar facial expressions when experiencing similar emotions and that observers from all cultures can interpret what any given person is feeling based on his or her facial expression. Indeed, Charles Darwin first championed this idea, arguing that facial expressions are species specific rather than culture specific. There is considerable evidence for this point of view.

Human beings are able to recognize facial expressions of at least six emotions with remarkable accuracy: happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. Impressively, this has been demonstrated even [Page 340]in cultures with no prior contact with Western societies (suggesting that the research participants did not learn these emotional expressions from various media). Furthermore, when members of preliterate cultures were asked to make various facial expressions, Americans were able to recognize which emotion they were expressing. Accuracy of judgments of facial expression is good when the target being judged is a still photograph of an expression. The accuracy of such judgments improves when people are allowed to judge the facial expression in action.

...