Judgment of feeling states from facial behavior: a bottom-up approach

A series of studies was conducted to examine the feasiblity of a bottom-up approach to the study of judgment of affective feeling states from facial behavior. Previous work on the judgment of emotion from facial expressions has taken a more top-down approach; observers judged the emotional meaning of a wholistic facial expression. Individual facial movements have sometimes then been identified within that complex expression, but the meaning of those individual movements has not been studied. A bottom-up approach begins by exploring the meaning of individual facial movements instead of complex facial expressions. In this approach the relationship between the emotional meaning of individual facial movements and complex facial expressions can be explored. It is argued that such an approach has the potential to explain judgment of not only a limited set of basic emotional expressions, but the full range of emotionally tinged feelings that individuals both experience in themselves and judge in others. Individual action units, as scored by Ekman and Friesen's (1978) Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and selected combinations of action units were presented to observers in three pairs of studies. Filmstrip sequences were used in the first pair of studies, and still photographs in the other two pairs. In the first study of each pair, observers judged the degree of pleasure and arousal expressed by the face. In the second study of each pair, observers rated how well each of a set of emotion terms described the feeling expressed by the face. Observers were found to reliably attribute meaning to individual action units on both scales. Additionally, pleasure and arousal judgments predicted emotion term ratings. The meaning attributed to combinations of action units was found to be related to the meanings of the individual action units occurring alone. Resultant ratings were shown to be meaningful within a dimensional model of emotion space.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat

Plans, schemas and affect

It has previously been suggested that a person's behavior in a place is mediated by his or her plans, and by his or her emotional response to the place; but the possible interactive effects of these influences have not been explored. Not only may a particular mood be the goal of a plan, but the process of planning may also produce changes in the planner's mood. It is here argued that a person's emotional response to a place is influenced by the extent of the alterations the place requires be made in his or her plans. It has been generally assumed that a person's liking of a place is decreased if it does not fit his or her plan, but the experiments reported here indicate that some incongruity may actually increase liking of a place if the person is able to modify the plans. Three experiments examined the effects of planning on two dimensions of mood--pleasure and arousal--and for liking of places. In experiment one, subjects who had just completed planning a route for completing a list of errands reported higher arousal than subjects who had judged the time required to complete the same errands. In experiment two, subjects who executed their own plan reported higher pleasure than subjects who executed a plan they had been given. In experiment three, subjects who had to alter their plans to accommodate the unexpected features of a place reported higher arousal and pleasure, and increased liking of the place over subjects who did not have to re-plan. These results suggest that the process of planning has measureable effects on mood and that these effects influence place-liking.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat