Dynamic Facial Expression of Emotion and Observer Inference

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Klaus R. Scherer¹  Heiner Ellgring²  Anja Dieckmann³  Matthias Unfried³  Marcello Mortillaro¹ 

[1] Department of Psychology and Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva;Department of Psychology, University of Würzburg;GfK Verein

关键词: dynamic facial emotion expression;    emotion recognition;    emotion enactment;    affect bursts;    appraisal theory of emotion expression;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00508

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Research on facial emotion expression has mostly focused on emotion recognition, assuming that a small number of discrete emotions is elicited and expressed via prototypical facial muscle configurations as captured in still photographs. These are expected to be recognized by observers, presumably via template matching. In contrast, appraisal theories of emotion propose a more dynamic approach, suggesting that specific elements of facial expressions are directly produced by the result of certain appraisals and predicting the facial patterns to be expected for certain appraisal configurations. This approach has recently been extended to emotion perception, claiming that observers first infer individual appraisals and only then make categorical emotion judgments based on the estimated appraisal patterns, using inference rules. Here, we report two related studies to empirically investigate the facial action unit configurations that are used by actors to convey specific emotions in short affect bursts and to examine to what extent observers can infer a person's emotions from the predicted facial expression configurations. The results show that (1) professional actors use many of the predicted facial action unit patterns to enact systematically specified appraisal outcomes in a realistic scenario setting, and (2) naïve observers infer the respective emotions based on highly similar facial movement configurations with a degree of accuracy comparable to earlier research findings. Based on estimates of underlying appraisal criteria for the different emotions we conclude that the patterns of facial action units identified in this research correspond largely to prior predictions and encourage further research on appraisal-driven expression and inference.

【 授权许可】

CC BY