AI Article Synopsis

  • Intense emotional situations (both positive and negative) lead to different expressions according to psychological models, but recent research suggests that distinguishing between these expressions is challenging, especially when judging isolated faces.
  • In experiments with adults and children, the facial reactions to strong positive (e.g., surprise reunions, Disneyland trips) and negative situations (e.g., terror attacks, Halloween candy loss) were analyzed.
  • The findings indicated that facial expressions are often ambiguous and do not reliably reflect the emotional valence of a situation, emphasizing the role of context in interpreting emotions.

Article 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. (PsycINFO Database Record

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000185DOI Listing

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