Facial Expression Theories

• Social perception is how people form impressions and make inferences about others.
• Initial judgments can be made in less than 100 milliseconds.

Nonverbal Behavior

• Nonverbal behavior serves as an important source of information about people.
• Facial expressions are an important part of this behavior.
• Tone of voice, gestures, body position, touch, and eye gaze are other elements.
• Non-verbal behavior has several uses:
• Expressing emotion
• Conveying attitudes
• Communicating personality traits
• Facilitating verbal communication
• Repeating or complementing spoken messages
• Substituting for spoken messages

Empathy and Mirror Neurons

• Observing other people's non-verbal behavior helps to build empathy.
• Mirror neuron systems respond to both observed and self-produced actions.
• Modest evidence suggests a role in empathy, but causality isn't proven.

Facial Expressions

• Facial expressions are the most important form of non-verbal communication.
• Darwin's universality hypothesis states primary emotions conveyed by the face are encoded/decoded the same way across humans and is species-specific.
• Studies like Matsumoto's and Ekman & Friesen's support this hypothesis.
• Ekman & Friesen (1971, 1972) studied the Fore tribe of New Guinea and found:
• "The enemy approaches" signals anger
• "Friends have come" signals happiness
• "A child has died" signals sadness
• Ekman et al. (1975) found that happiness was recognized by 82% of participants across cultures (US, Brazil, Chile, Japan, Argentina, New Guinea).
• Cultures varied in recognition of other emotions; for instance, fear at 54% in Argentina & New Guinea and disgust at 44% in New Guinea.
• Other emotions include contempt, pride, embarrassment, anxiety, shame, guilt and pain.
• Russell et al. (1993) showed pictures of six basic emotions and contempt to participants in Japan, Greece, & Canada finding that:
• Happiness was widely identified.
• Only 14% of Japanese participants could name fear.
• Contempt was not identified in any country.
• Context can influence understanding of facial expressions (Russell & Fehr, 1987).
• Aviezer et al. (2008) determined that context matters.
• Anger is perceived in context of determination.
• Disgust is perceived in context of confusion.
• Sadness if perceived in context of fear.
• Cultural differences exist (Masuda et al., 2008), with culture influencing perceptions.
• Ito et al. (2012) found context impacts perception of facial expressions.

Accuracy of Facial Expressions

• Accuracy can be decreased by blended affects (e.g., fear + surprise).
• Display rules culturally determine if emotions should be displayed.
• Anger/powerful emissions are most often displayed for men
• Negative emotions are discouraged in collective cultures
• Gender differences exist: women are often better at reading expressing positive/negative emotions.
• This may be due to the attachment promotion hypothesis
• Masks confuse counterparts in reading emotions (Carbon, 2020).
• Ross & George (2022) find the problem exists when the whole body is not visible.

Cultural Differences in Nonverbal Behaviors

• Many non-verbal behaviors are culture specific.
• Eye contact and gaze vary.
• Personal space and physical touch has variance.
• Hand and head gestures differ.
• Nodding head means "no" in Greece and Bulgaria
• Non-verbal gestures that have a well-established meaning in a given culture are cultural emblems.
• Emails may result in misunderstandings, especially because of a lack of non-verbal cues (Kruger et al., 2005.)

First Impressions

• Initial judgments based on facial expressions take less than 100 milliseconds.
• A tendency to form impressions on facial expressions manifests around 3 years old.
• "Thin slices of behavior" involve brief (1 second to 5 minutes) video or audio clips, and raters are able to make better than chance accuracy judgments about the person being shown or heard (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1990).

Implicit Personality Theories

• A type of schema that people use to group personality traits together.
• People fill in the blanks with schemas of what traits go together. Beautiful = sincere, considerate, successful.
• High self-esteem = intelligent, conscientious, emotionally stable.
• Shy = unintelligent.
• A Western culture = artistic IPT
• Chinese culture = shi gu IPT
• IPTs are influenced by language (Hoffman et al., 1986).
  • English monolinguals reading in English embellish artistic character, not Shi gu.
• English-Chinese bilinguals reading in English embellish artistic character, not Shi gu.
• English-Chinese bilinguals reading in Chinese embellish Shi gu character, not artistic.

Causal Attributions

• Attribution theory relates to how people explain the causes of their own and others' behaviors.
• Heider (1958) is considered the father of attribution theory.
• Internal attributions are personal characteristics.
• External attributions are situational factors.
• The covariation model (Kelly, 1967, 1973) states data is collected on multiple variables and behaviors to categorize other peoples' behavior as external or internal.
• Consensus is information about the extent to which other people behave similarly.
• Distinctiveness is the extent to which one particular actor behaves the same way to different stimuli.
• Consistency is the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances.
• Research finds heavier reliance on consistency & distinctiveness than on consensus.
• Information on all three may not be available.
• The model assumes people think systematically and logically.

Fundamental Attribution Error

• Fundamental attribution error (FAE) involves emphasizing internal factors while downplaying external factors as causes of behavior.
• Consequences can include blaming the victim.
• Examples are if one could exercise control
• A Canadian judge asked a sexual assault complainant why she could not "keep your knees together" (2014)
• Perceptual salience involves the point of focus on the person vs the situation.
• Information about situational causes may be unavailable or difficult to accurately interpret.
• Judgements and police officers saw videotaped confession (Lassiter et al., 2007)
• Suspect focused rated as voluntary more often than other conditions.
• A two-step process is involved where internal attribution is made, then adjusted considering the situation.
• Cultural differences can arise.

Actor-Observer Bias

• Actor-observer bias refers to attributes of the situation self, but other people's actions have internal attributes.
• Self: both groups situational attributes.

Self-Serving Attributions

• Self-serving attributions mean when people's self-esteem have internal/external attributes.
• Successes are attributed to internal factors.
• Failures are attributed to external factors.
• Self-serving bias and group work (Ross & Sicoly 1979)
• Van Winkle et al. (2008) researched campers' perception of their impact on the environment
• In US and other Western countries:
• Culture & self-serving bias can influence how situations are perceived.
• Culture & self-serving bias are strongest in the US and other Western countries
• Those that are very low/absent in Asian countries have self-critical attributes

Defensive Attributions

• Defensive attributions mitigate feelings of vulnerability and mortality with unrealistic optimism.
• The belief in a just world is relevant.
• Bad things happen to bad people/stupid mistake, therefore, will not happen to the believer.
• Consequences of just world beliefs can include victim blaming and a belief one is invulnerable so:
• The world is not random, a higher power is in charge.
• Good things will also happen.
• Efforts and good work pays off.
• Function involves maintaining motivation and planning ahead.
• Bias blind spot is the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.