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This chapter refines and defends the conception of emotions as literally perceptible in the face. It begins with an overview of Darwin's position on facial expression as espoused in his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Later theories of the psychology and evolutionary biology of facial expression are then considered: the Neurocultural View as espoused by P. Ekman, W. Friesen, R. Levenson, and others; and the Behavioral Ecology View as espoused by A. Fridlund and others. After objections to both of these more recent views are raised, a new view of facial expression is espoused, the Strategic Readout View (SRV). The SRV builds on earlier chapters and incorporates the insights of both the Neurocultural and Behavioral Ecology views.

This chapter describes the major research findings from our program of research on culture, emotion, and expression over the past thirty years, covering both studies examining the judgment of emotional stimuli across cultures (judgment studies) as well as studies examining the production of emotional expressions across cultures (production studies). Within both sets of studies, the chapter reports aspects of emotional expressions that are panculturally universal, as well as those that are culture-specific. The chapter presents new evidence demonstrating the likely biological innateness of an archaic, evolutionarily evolved, pancultural emotion system. Considering the existence of both universal, biologically based aspects as well as culture-specific aspects of emotional expressions, the chapter presents a theoretical framework describing the cultural calibration of the biologically-innate, evolutionarily evolved system to account for universality and cultural differences.

This chapter argues that infant facial expressions and other communicative behaviours should be examined as biologically-based adaptations crucial for the infant's survival and normal development. In this sense some of the most characteristic facial expressions shown by young infants may be thought as ontogenetic adaptations — a term used to designate neurobehavioural attributes and capacities of immature animals, which may have evolved because of the adaptive functions they serve in ontogeny. An ontogenetic perspective on the development of emotional expression implies that there are likely to be changes as well as continuities in the morphology, affective meaning, and communicative function of some facial expressions. For this reason, precise and object measures are needed to describe the patterns of expressions shown by infants, regardless of whether they resemble prototypical adult expressions, and to trace developmental changes in infant facial expressions.

This chapter determines whether facial expression and subjective measures of emotion occur together on a momentary basis during specific emotional episodes. It specifically aims to assess the extent to which coherence does occur. It also outlines the major methodological issues that complicate the study of coherence and offers a new technique that addresses some of these problems. The results provide the first evidence that there is coherence between facial expression and self-report of emotion at specific moments. It is also shown that measurement of facial expression and self-report of specific emotions on a momentary basis provides solid evidence of a coherent emotional response, especially for more intense emotional events. A study on whether the facial expressive system and the subjective, experiential system act together during specific instances of emotion is examined.

Interest in examining the underlying mechanisms of young infants' face-processing abilities is increasing; hence this paper presents a review of infants' abilities to recognize and respond to faces and their conveyed emotion as social stimuli different from other types of objects. A discussion on evidence from imitation, response to still faces, patterns of visual attention and social referencing suggests that infants have the ability to understand the meaning of faces even before they reach the age of one, and that this continues to develop during childhood. At the neurobiological level, this could be attributed to early maturation of the occipitotemporal cortex, amygdala and other cortical structures, and the delayed maturation of other structures and their connections. Evidence shows that the development of expression recognition and responses in infants is influenced strongly by experience.

This chapter reviews research on interest as an emotion. Modern theories in affective science propose that emotions consist of components, such as facial and vocal expressions, subjective experience, motivational functions, and physiological changes. A small body of work suggests that the experience of interest involves changes in facial expressions and vocal expressions. The function of interest is to motivate knowledge-seeking and exploration, which over time builds knowledge and competence. Interest's subjective quality is positive and active, consistent with its approach-oriented function. These components are coherent: subjective, expressive, and behavioral components of interest correlate with each other, indicating an organized emotional response. Finally, many experiments on emotion and aesthetics show that interest is distinct from the similar emotion of happiness/enjoyment: they have different causes and different effects on exploration.

This book presents previously published articles on spontaneous facial expression in a single volume. It also contains short essays that offer the reader a glimpse of the researchers' current thinking on the issues addressed in their articles. It specifically focuses on the research involving measurement of the face itself. The book is divided into two major sections: one on basic research and the other on applied research. The basic research portion consists mainly of research relevant to the psychology of emotion, but it also includes basic research on related topics, namely deception and pain. The applied portion presents studies in which facial measures were examined in relation to mental or physical health variables. It concludes with a chapter by Paul Ekman, in which he integrates what has been learned by measuring the face, comments on the specific contributions to various fields by the studies reprinted in this volume, and offers suggestions for future research. The remainder of this introductory chapter includes an overview of the reprinted research articles, a brief history of the study of the face in modern psychology, and a discussion of facial measurement procedures.

This chapter focuses on facial expressions. It describes many studies in which people were induced to adopt facial expressions and then reported corresponding feelings. A very large number of studies have demonstrated that changing a person's facial expressions will produce corresponding changes in emotional feelings. A number of kinds of data indicate that these effects are not attributable to experimental demand, but that there are other data and arguments that will strengthen this conclusion. The effects of expressions on feelings also are large enough to justify further theoretical elaboration. However, they do not occur in all people. Instead, consistent, reliable differences in the effects of expressions on feelings have been observed.

This chapter explores the development of automated facial expression analysis, the effort to program computers to recognize facial expressions as they form on and move across people's faces. While facial recognition technology treats the face as a “blank somatic surface” to be differentiated from other faces as an index of identity, automated facial expression analysis treats the dynamic surface of the face as the site of differentiation. In automated facial expression analysis, the dimensions and intensities of facial movements are analyzed as indices of emotion and cognition to determine what people are thinking and feeling. Automation of facial expression analysis promises to accomplish what facial recognition technology fails to do: read the interior of the person off the surface of the face, using the face itself as a field of classifiable information about the individual.

Recent reports have suggested that asymmetries in facial expressions result from cerebral hemispheric specialization. This chapter evaluates the theoretical models on whether emotional or nonemotional neural processes are involved, and whether specialization of the right, the left, or both hemispheres underlies asymmetry. The results indicate that factors producing asymmetry in deliberate movements are not related directly to positive emotional processes involving smiling, nor to processes giving rise to negative, reflex-like startle reactions. It is also shown that asymmetries of certain individual deliberate actions are lateralized, implying that the subjects have in common some functional asymmetry related to differential use of the hemispheres or some structural, anatomical asymmetry, or both asymmetries. The background for the preceding study is the conviction that the phenomenon of asymmetry in facial muscular actions might reflect important aspects of neural action or other factors. Its main point is that no extant theory of a single process involving hemispheric specialization could explain the pattern of results in the study.

Implicit motives orient one’s attention toward motivational incentives and energize and select behaviors that facilitate incentive attainment. Yet, the exact qualities of these incentives were not rigorously explored until recently, and early research reports hindered the field by only offering vague references to what motivational incentives were. This chapter discusses and critiques major models of motive-specific incentives by McClelland and colleagues from the 1950s and 1980s as well as those by Schultheiss in the 2000s. Lastly, this chapter argues that nonverbal signals are the core implicit motivational incentives and presents a motivational field theory of motivational incentives proposing that facial expressions of emotion function as motive-specific incentives.

The chapter shows how facial expressions are used in pursuing emotional responses to tellings. The data come from five dyadic conversations over lunch, recorded by three cameras. Sometimes a story, an announcement, or other telling, that is designed to convey the speaker’s emotional stance towards what is told, is not met by the recipient’s immediate emotional response. In such cases, the speaker may pursue response verbally. However, the chapter shows that a response can also be pursued by the speaker producing a facial expression at the closure of the telling. Such facial expressions can reinforce the stance of the telling, they can explicate a stance that in the (verbal) telling left implicit, or they can modify the stance. The chapter discusses these findings in the context of recent psychological theories on regulation of emotion.

In this chapter we define the problem space and describe the core components of automatic facial expression recognition systems. In particular, we discuss the most prominent methods of face segmentation, face registration, feature extraction, classification, and temporal integration. We then present several practical applications of expression recognition technology. Finally, we comment on the core future challenges to the field, including generalization to multiple poses and ethnicities, collection of better training data, evaluation infrastructure, and commercialization.

Expressive behaviors are an indispensable part of any believeable virtual agent. They add liveliness to the virtual character and allow for clearer communication. This chapter is dedicated to computational models of expressive behaviors. The variety of these models arise from the richness of the theories trying to explain human behavior. For this reason, first the chapter introduces the main theories of human expressive behavior and then classifies computational models according to them. Expressive behaviors based on interactions not only consist of the choice of the appropriate set of nonverbal signals (e.g., facial expressions, gestures) to express agent’s intentions but also in their appropriate realization. For this reason, the authors also present the computational models of expressive and dynamic qualities of a movement. Finally, the expressive behavior can be influenced by social context or the behavior of its interlocutor. The authors conclude this section by presenting models of regulation of emotional expressions.

This chapter presents two studies that examined the encoding and decoding of facial expression of emotions portrayed by actors. In Study 1, facial expressions portrayed by actors in two encoding conditions are explored. Study 2 was concerned with the decoding of actors' portrayals of emotions from facial behavior. Results of Study 1 showed that the facial components of emotions portrayed by actors correspond, to a certain degree, to those that characterize genuine emotions. Meanwhile, Study 2 illustrated that the facial portrayals allowed decoders to judge the emotional category in each encoding condition very well. The studies that showed how the problems were solved, or how to avoid them in the future, are discussed.

This chapter addresses the differences between emotion elicited, which is spontaneous, and deliberate emotional facial expressions, specifically in relation to the dynamic features of the facial expressions that might differentiate the two types of display. The results regarding the dynamic parameters predicted to differ between spontaneous and deliberate expressions, onset time and offset time, were different for the two experiments. The results of Experiment 1 were not consistent with the hypotheses. The deliberate expressions in Experiment 2 were elicited by asking subjects to deceive an observer about their emotional state by masking it with an incongruent emotional expression. Generally, the data provides strong evidence for the notion that the irregularity of the expression differentiates spontaneous and deliberate happy expressions and tentative evidence for this difference in disgust expressions, while addressing some of the methodological concerns regarding previous research. The objective differences versus observers' Ratings are also discussed.