Alan J. Fridlund

Audience effects on solitary faces during imagery: displaying to the people in your head

Subjects imagined situations in which they reported enjoying themselves either alone or with others. Electromyographic (EMG) activity was recorded bilaterally from regions overlying thezygomatic major muscles responsible for smiling. Controlling for equal rated happiness in the two conditions, subjects showed more smiling in high-sociality than low-sociality imagery. In confirming “imaginary audience effects” during imagery, these data corroborate hypotheses that solitary facial displays are mediated by the presence of imaginary interactants, and suggest caution in employing them as measures of felt emotion.

Audience effects in affective imagery: Replication and extension to dysphoric imagery

Subjects imagined situations during which they reported feeling happiness, sadness, anger, or fear, at both low and high levels of imagined sociality. Electromyographic (EMG) activity was recorded from four facial sites overlying the left forehead, brow, cheek, and lip. Controlling for reported emotion, facial EMG activity was influenced by the sociality of the imagery. Results corroborate previous findings of imaginary audience effects on smiling, and extend these effects to imagined situations that elicit dysphoria.

Relations between tickling and humorous laughter: preliminary support for the Darwin-Hecker hypothesis.

Following hypotheses by Darwin and Hecker on the connection between tickling and humorous laughter, questionnaire data were collected from 100 college students regarding their reported ticklishness and tendencies to laugh and show responses ancillary to laughter. Ticklishness was related to propensities to: (a) giggle, (b) laugh, (c) smile, (d) piloerect, (e) blush, and (f) cry. These findings lend preliminary support for the Darwin-Hecker conjecture that reflexes underlying ticklishness mediate humor. We speculate on possible relations among tickling and humor, and reasons why people laugh and smile when they find things funny.

DARWIN'S ANTI-DARWINISM IN EXPRESSION OF THE EMOTIONS IN MAN AND ANIMALS

This chapter reviews Darwins study of facial expressions in his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , 1872. Much of the Expressions volume consists of a cataloging of display movements that show resemblances across species; this was done to collaborate his views that continuity in bodily movements and gestures of humans was a characteristic shared with other species. Darwin proposed that expressions were either accidents of nervous system wiring—direct actions—or vestiges of old habits. The vestigial habits were the behavioral equivalents of the rudimentary, atrophied, or aborted organs, he had cited as evidence for natural selection and against arguments from special creation or directed evolution. He contested that facial expressions did not express emotion; communicative function was restricted to those faces where they were deployed willfully. They simply accompanied emotion by force of habit. Thus, Darwin proposed mutadis mutandis in the context of facial expression. Darwins strategy of demonstrating nonadaptive nature of expressions succeeded at the cost of forsaking an intrinsic communicative role for facial expressions qua expressions.

What can asymmetry and laterality in EMG tell us about the face and brain

This paper will review the use of the electromyographic (EMG) technique for studying asymmetry and laterality in facial behavior. My discussion will include several issues: (1) a review of the neurology of facial expression with respect to asymmetry/laterality; (2) a compendium of models of cerebral hemispheric participation in emotion and in facial motor control that imply asymmetry-laterality in facial behavior; (3) a summary of facial asymmetry-laterality findings to date; and (4) uses and abuses of EMG techniques in inferring asymmetry-laterality in facial behavior. I conclude with (5) recommendations for future facial asymmetry-laterality research in general.

Approaches to Goldie: A Field Study of Human Approach Responses to Canine Juvenescence

ABSTRACTApproaches by human passers-by to a Golden Retriever puppy with a human companion were tallied as the puppy aged from ten weeks to 33 weeks. Over this period, approaches were most numerous when the puppy was youngest, with females approaching more than males during the first half of sampling, but equaling male approaches during the second half. Both the number of human approaches and the proportions of males and females were independent of the sex of the puppys human companion. The results suggest a human, and especially a female, preference for canine juvenescence.

A Cognitive Science Approach to Neuropsychological Assessment

In the past 25 years, cognitive scientists have generated a wealth of knowledge about the structure and processes of cognition. Unfortunately, extensions of this knowledge from the experimental laboratory to clinical practice have been infrequent. We believe that the incorporation of principles from cognitive science into clinical tests makes possible a new generation of assessment instruments. In this chapter, we address methodological shortcomings of traditional intellectual and neuropsychological tests, and provide the rationale for the cognitive science approach to test construction. We then discuss a new set of neuropsychological test that we have developed based on the cognitive science approach.

Smiling, Frowning, and Autonomic Activity in Mildly Depressed and Nondepressed Men in Response to Emotional Imagery of Social Contexts

The study examined self-reported emotion and facial muscle and autonomic activity of depressed and nondepressed men in response to the social context of emotional situations. 20 university men, assessed on the Beck Depression Inventory, were asked to imagine happy and sad situations with and without visualizing other people. No differences were found between men classified as depressed and nondepressed on self-reported emotion and facial muscle activity. Smiling did not show differences between social contexts although self-reported happiness was increased during happy-social compared to happy-solitary imagery. Adjusting smiling for social context differences in happiness showed less smiling during happy-social than during happy-solitary imagery. In contrast, self-reported sadness and frowning were greater during sad-social compared to sad-solitary imagery. No differences between social contexts were found when frowning was adjusted for social context differences in sadness. Depressed-scoring men showed higher mean heart rate during sad-social than sad-solitary imagery whereas nondepressed-scoring men showed higher mean heart rate during happy-social compared to happy-solitary imagery. The results indicate that men may frown more when sad but generally do not smile more during happy-social imagery, independent of depression. Depressed mood may affect heart rate during sad imagery but may not alter facial muscle activity and self-reported emotion in men.

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Research in Small-Scale Societies: Studying Emotions and Facial Expressions in the Field

Although cognitive science was multidisciplinary from the start, an under-emphasis on anthropology has left the field with limited research in small scale, indigenous societies. Neglecting the anthropological perspective is risky, given that once-canonical cognitive science findings have often been shown to be artifacts of enculturation rather than cognitive universals. This imbalance has become more problematic as the increased use of Western theory-driven approaches, many of which assume human uniformity (“universality”), confronts the absence of a robust descriptive base that might provide clarifying or even contrary evidence. We highlight the need for remedies to such shortcomings by suggesting a two-fold methodological shift. First, studies conducted in indigenous societies can benefit by relying on multidisciplinary research groups to diminish ethnocentrism and enhance the quality of the data. Second, studies devised for Western societies can readily be adapted to the changing settings encountered in the field. Here, we provide examples, drawn from the areas of emotion and facial expressions, to illustrate potential solutions to recurrent problems in enhancing the quality of data collection, hypothesis testing, and the interpretation of results.

On Scorched Earths and Bad Births: Scarantino's Misbegotten “Theory of Affective Pragmatics”

Andrea Scarantino (this issue) advances a newfangled “theory of affective pragmatics” (TAP), with the claim that “much of what we can do with language we can also do with non-verbal emotional expressions” (p. 165). This is clearly a claim that he will have to dial back or at least delimit, as no one yet knows how to smile a synecdoche or gesticulate a Grignard reaction diagram. And dial it back he does, thankfully only one paragraph later, when he concedes that “the critical transition point in the evolution of linguistic communication is the separation of the communicative force of an expression from its propositional content, an achievement that nonverbal emotional communication does not allow for” (pp. 165–166). After the retraction, he arrives at this nothing-burger: Language is not only propositional but also pragmatic, and gosh darn, maybe some nonverbal expressions work likewise. The same finger that can indicate the number 1 can also tell someone what to do with himself. What’s left to say? Well, it turns out, a great deal, if you manage not to pay homage to many of the theorists who preceded you and forged the path. Here, I am only taking vicarious umbrage on behalf of people like Jose-Miguel Fern andez-Dols, Stephen Levinson, and Tim Wharton, who have already worked at understanding facial expressions and gestures via pragmatics (e.g., Fern andez-Dols, 2017; Levinson, 2006; Wharton, 2009). Scarantino doesn’t bother himself to “compare and contrast”; for him, nearly all of TAP is de novo. I also take umbrage on behalf of Charles Darwin (1872), whose logic in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (hereafter, Expression) he somehow misses completely. Those with a sense of both irony and the history of emotion will appreciate that Scarantino’s christening his new baby a theory of “Affective/Pragmatics” is oxymoronic. The problems start with just that titular incoherence. They follow with his paradigm-lock insistence on the term “emotional expressions.” Having conceded at the outset that “emotional expressions do much more than simply expressing emotions” (p. 165), why the death grip on the “emotional” qualifier? Are the faces we make in social commerce “emotional expressions,” and if so, what does this mean? Whatever “emotion” is, operationally, is a question on which Scarantino will punt, but by forcing the term nonetheless, we shall see that Scarantino forecloses other interpretations and ends up contorting pragmatics into alien frameworks. Scarantino seeks to deliver his new TAP from the rubble of the two main views on facial expressions, Ekman’s version of basic emotions theory (BET) and my Behavioral Ecology View of human facial displays (BECV). Although Scarantino accuses me of using “scorched-earth” language in presenting BECV, his own shots are both acerbic and misguided. For him, both views make assumptions that are “unwarranted and stand in the way of progress” (p. 166). As I review next, his treatment of Ekman is superficial and contradictory. Whereas he presents the argument that Ekman’s early cross-cultural studies may demonstrate uniformity via common descent, he also praises Ekman’s litany of seven items of information that all facial “emotional expressions” supposedly carry. But if those expressions carry seven kinds of information, how can those early studies possibly prove “universality of basic emotions” if they assessed only one of the seven? That Scarantino can uncritically entertain both positions attests to his superficial treatment of Ekman’s thinking. Scarantino’s knocks on BECV center on what amounts to an outlandish confabulation, his claim that, for BECV, facial displays must be “voluntary.” His invention of this “voluntariness” claim, however, allows him to make all kinds of distinctions between BECV and TAP, distinctions that exist only for him. All of this has not left me a happy camper, especially because I have known Scarantino for thoughtfulness and scholarly depth in his prior coverage of emotion theories and the history of the emotion concept. I have also appreciated how he commissioned and oversaw the 2015 “Great Debate” among facial expression theorists for the Emotion Review newsletter, the house organ of the International Society for Research on Emotion. I was one of the three contributors to the Debate, and he showed exemplary fairmindedness to me and the other participants, both in print and in private (Debate at http://emotionresearcher.com/thegreat-expressions-debate/, with the Debate manifestos expanded and republished as chapters in Fern andez-Dols & Russell, 2017; e.g., Fridlund, 2017). Sadly, balance and depth are in short supply here. This is a commentary and not a primary article, and although my rejoinders won’t be brief, they’ll be briefer than I’d like. I’ll present them section by section.