The facial expression of emotions is defined by two criteria: The muscles involved and the gestures that characterize it. There are certain distinctive affective reaction patterns, generalized and shared by the majority of human beings. They are emotions considered “basic”: joy, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust
Facial Expression Recognition
There is still a considerable ignorance about the processes involved in the recognition of emotions, or about the strategies used to identify them. One of the hypotheses, the so-called imitation impulse, states that we learn that certain sensations produced when performing a facial movement are related to a particular emotional state.
When we look at a certain facial expression We tend to imitate it and the sensations that are generated are some of the main variables in its recognition. Factors that can affect facial expression recognition:
- Emotional state of the observer. The recognition and intensity of said affective reaction is usually congruent with the affective reaction and the level of activation of the person observing said emotion.
- Influence of context. A neutral facial expression can appear sad if it is presented next to a face that is full of happiness, or happy if the face that appears next to it shows deep sadness. Even the sequence of presentation, the order in which different facial expressions are made, can affect both the recognition of a given expression and its perceived intensity. According to Thayer, those facial expressions that were preceded by a sequence of opposite affective reactions were identified as more intense. Given that an important component in the categorization of perception is the intensity of said emotion, we can assume that the same emotional expression can be interpreted differently depending on the context or framework of
- Execution feedback. Facial expression recognition is also learned and, therefore, it is a skill subject to the same general principles of learning as any other psychological process. When we provide feedback on emotion recognition, the identification of these emotions in different situations, It is more effective than if no such feedback is provided.
- Imitation and modeling. The ability to recognize facial expression can be optimized through learning processes such as modeling and imitation. Imitation plays an important role in the decoding of emotions and this process occurs from an early age, which was already highlighted by Darwin. According to Wallbot, the degree of recognition and imitation depends on the type of emotion.
- Individual differences. The subject’s history of reinforcement conditions the subject’s ability to identify certain facial expressions.
- Biases. Once a specific facial expression has been identified as reflecting a specific emotional reaction, it is very likely that if the same stimulus configuration is presented again, the observer will maintain congruence and categorize it in the same way, even if the initial recognition would have been incorrect. The relevance of biases varies depending on the affective reaction in question. Thus, the distortion produced by incorrect labeling is less in negative emotions such as anger, disgust or contempt, emotions that are usually correctly identified.
- Expectations and attributions about the emotional state. The observer has a series of expectations about the emotional state of the subject, depending on the situation in which he is found, the behaviors he manifests and any information he has about him. These expectations affect the recognition of emotional expression.
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