Motivation, Display Rules, and Expressive Dialects Affect the Display and Decoding of Facial Expressions of Emotion

Research Topic
Motivation, Display Rules, and Expressive Dialects Affect the Display and Decoding of Facial Expressions of Emotion

Lead Researcher
Young Steven Graham, Baruch College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, Associate Professor

Host Researcher
Yoshiyuki Ueda, Senior Lecturer, Kokoro Research Center, Kyoto University

Collaborating Researcher
Kurt Hugenberg, Indiana University, Professor

Maintaining complex social networks requires sophisticated forms of interpersonal communication, including nonverbal means of conveying information between individuals (Sato, Krumhuber, Jellema, & Williams, 2019). Humans, with our uniquely complex and highly dynamic sociality (e.g., Boyd, 2006), rely heavily on non-verbal signals for interpersonal communication. Above all, the communication of emotional states via facial expressions of emotion is of considerable importance (Darwin, 1872; Matsumoto, Keltner, Shiota, O’Sullivan, & Frank, 2008).

Emotional expressions convey important social signals, including a person’s internal psychological state and potential behaviors (e.g., Hareli & Hess, 2012; Parkinson, 2005). For example, across cultures, genuine smiles suggest that a person is happy and likely to approach in a benevolent manner, whereas a snarl instead indicates anger and the possibility of imminent conflict (e.g., Adams, Ambady, Macrae, & Kleck, 2006; Fridlund, 1994; Lustgraff, Sacco, & Young, 2016). For this signaling system to function, it is imperative that emotional displays be broadcast clearly by the sender and interpreted accurately by the receiver (Jack & Schyns, 2015).

However, facial expressions show important differences across groups as well. For example, whereas all human groups smile to signal benevolence, exactly how and when smiles are employed show some variability (Chen & Jack, 2017; Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002, 2003). Thus, these so-called “dialects” in facial expressions mean that the same expressions for happiness, anger, and other expressions are enacted somewhat differently across different groups. In the present proposal I am interested in examining how individuals strategically modulate their expressive dialect usage to meet their goals of communication and social connection. Put simply, do individuals nonverbally “code switch” when interacting with members of different ethnic and cultural groups? To address this question, I am interested in adopting a cross-cultural perspective and believe that a collaboration with Drs. Yoshikawa and Sato will be productive and lead to theoretically compelling research. Below, I briefly outline a specific set of experiments that we could complete together.

2020/05/29