Professional actors demonstrate variability, not stereotypical expressions, when portraying emotional states in photographs

Tuan Le Mau, Katie Hoemann, Sam H. Lyons, Jennifer M. B. Fugate, Emery N. Brown, Maria Gendron and Lisa Feldman Barrett ()
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Tuan Le Mau: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Katie Hoemann: Department of Psychology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Sam H. Lyons: Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania
Jennifer M. B. Fugate: Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth
Emery N. Brown: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Maria Gendron: Department of Psychology, Yale University
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Department of Psychology, Northeastern University

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25352-6

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