Professional actors demonstrate variability, not stereotypical expressions, when portraying emotional states in photographs
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s41467-021-25352-6.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
3.16 MB
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Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Le Mau, Tuan
Hoemann, Katie
Lyons, Sam H
Fugate, Jennifer MB
Brown, Emery Neal
Gendron, Maria
Barrett, Lisa Feldman
Date Issued
December 2021
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Le Mau, Tuan, Hoemann, Katie, Lyons, Sam H, Fugate, Jennifer MB, Brown, Emery N et al. 2021. "Professional actors demonstrate variability, not stereotypical expressions, when portraying emotional states in photographs." Nature Communications, 12 (1).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
It is long hypothesized that there is a reliable, specific mapping between certain emotional states and the facial movements that express those states. This hypothesis is often tested by asking untrained participants to pose the facial movements they believe they use to express emotions during generic scenarios. Here, we test this hypothesis using, as stimuli, photographs of facial configurations posed by professional actors in response to contextually-rich scenarios. The scenarios portrayed in the photographs were rated by a convenience sample of participants for the extent to which they evoked an instance of 13 emotion categories, and actors’ facial poses were coded for their specific movements. Both unsupervised and supervised machine learning find that in these photographs, the actors portrayed emotional states with variable facial configurations; instances of only three emotion categories (fear, happiness, and surprise) were portrayed with moderate reliability and specificity. The photographs were separately rated by another sample of participants for the extent to which they portrayed an instance of the 13 emotion categories; they were rated when presented alone and when presented with their associated scenarios, revealing that emotion inferences by participants also vary in a context-sensitive manner. Together, these findings suggest that facial movements and perceptions of emotion vary by situation and transcend stereotypes of emotional expressions. Future research may build on these findings by incorporating dynamic stimuli rather than photographs and studying a broader range of cultural contexts.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25352-6
