The Duchenne smile: emotional expression and brain physiology II

Abstract

Facial expression, EEG, and self-report of subjective emotional experience were recorded while sub-jects individually watched both pleasant and unpleasant films. Smiling in which the muscle that orbits the eye is active in addition to the muscle that pulls the lip comers up (the Duchenne smile) was compared with other smiling in which the muscle orbiting the eye was not active. As predicted, the Duchenne smile was related to enjoyment interms of occurring more often during the pleasant than the unpleasant films, in measures of cerebral symmetry, and in relation to subjective reports of positive motions, and other smiling was not. In the introduction to his book The Expression of the Emo-tions in Man and Animals (1872/1955), Darwin described his indebtedness to the French anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne, who had published his Mecanisme de ia Physionomie Humaine 10 years earlier, in 1862. Darwin explained how Duehenne analyses by means of electricity, and illustrates by magnificent pho-tographs, the movements of the facial muscles.... No one has more carefully studied the contraction of each separate muscle