Fábio P. Pádua Júnior, Paulo H. M. Prado, Scott S. Roeder, Eduardo B. Andrade
Abstract
Research into the authenticity of facial emotion expressions often focuses on the physical properties of the face while paying little attention to the role of beliefs in emotion perception. Further, the literature most often investigates how people express a pre-determined emotion rather than what facial emotion expressions people strategically choose to express. To fill these gaps, this paper proposes a non-verbal zero-sum game - the Face X Game - to assess the role of contextual beliefs and strategic displays of facial emotion expression in interpersonal interactions. This new research paradigm was used in a series of three studies, where two participants are asked to play the role of the sender (individual expressing emotional information on his/her face) or the observer (individual interpreting the meaning of that expression). Study 1 examines the outcome of the game with reference to the sex of the pair, where senders won more frequently when the pair was comprised of at least one female. Study 2 examines the strategic display of facial emotion expressions. The outcome of the game was again contingent upon the sex of the pair. Among female pairs, senders won the game more frequently, replicating the pattern of results from study 1. We also demonstrate that senders who strategically express an emotion incongruent with the valence of the event (e.g., smile after seeing a negative event) are able to mislead observers, who tend to hold a congruent belief about the meaning of the emotion expression. If sending an incongruent signal helps to explain why female senders win more frequently, it logically follows that female observers were more prone to hold a congruent, and therefore inaccurate, belief. This prospect implies that while female senders are willing and/or capable of displaying fake smiles, paired-female observers are not taking this into account. Study 3 investigates the role of contextual factors by manipulating female observers' beliefs. When prompted to think in an incongruent manner, these observers significantly improve their performance in the game. These findings emphasize the role that contextual factors play in emotion perception-observers' beliefs do indeed affect their judgments of facial emotion expressions.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 08 June 2016.
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#16,754,527
of 26,367,306 outputs
Outputs from Frontiers in Psychology
#17,621
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Outputs of similar age
#175,483
of 315,792 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychology
#269
of 432 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 26,367,306 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 34th percentile – i.e., 34% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 35,210 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 13.8. This one is in the 47th percentile – i.e., 47% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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