Are you friendly or just polite? - analysis of smiles in spontaneous face-to-face interactions

This work is part of a research effort to understand and characterize the morphological and dynamic features of polite and amused smiles. We analyzed a dataset consisting of young adults (n=61), interested in learning about banking services, who met with a professional banker face-to-face in a conference room while both participants’ faces were unobtrusively recorded. We analyzed 258 instances of amused and polite smiles from this dataset, noting also if they were shared, which we defined as if the rise of one starts before the decay of another. Our analysis confirms previous findings showing longer durations of amused smiles while also suggesting new findings about symmetry of the smile dynamics. We found more symmetry in the velocities of the rise and decay of the amused smiles, and less symmetry in the polite smiles. We also found fastest decay velocity for polite but shared smiles.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF IIS Award HCC-0705647)MIT Media Lab Consortiu

Emotional expressions reconsidered: challenges to inferring emotion from human facial movements

It is commonly assumed that a person’s emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications; and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision. In this article, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the common view, and we then examine the scientific evidence that tests this view, focusing on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. But our review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life. This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require