Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• DeLancey, Cheryl L

Titel

What is in a face? Hedonic tone judgments and behavioral inclinations in response to emerging emotional facial expressions

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2006

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• While many researchers study nonverbal emotion recognition and interpersonal behaviors in emotional contexts, few have explored the dynamics of how the former relates to the latter. This study focuses on identification of emerging emotional facial expressions and reported behavioral inclinations toward them. General forms of behavioral disposition, such as behavioral inhibition system (BIS) sensitivity and behavioral activation system (BAS) sensitivity, were expected to be related to avoidant and approach-related behavioral inclinations toward the emerging expressions, respectively. The strength of one's stereotypical gender associations was also expected to predict a difference in behavioral inclinations toward male and female emerging expressions. To test these hypotheses, 116 young adults (17--22 years old) viewed movies depicting happy, sad and angry emotional facial expressions as they emerged from a neutral expression at three low-intensity levels, low-low, medium-low, and high-low. In the behavioral inclination (BI) condition, participants indicated how much they would like to approach or avoid each person depicted (on an 11-point bipolar scale), and chose a specific behavior they would like to enact toward the person (e.g. comfort, smile at, avoid). Participants in the affective identification condition rated how positive or negative the person depicted was feeling (on an 11-point bipolar scale), and chose the specific emotion depicted (e.g. happy, fearful). Results demonstrated that behavioral dispositions and gender associations play a role in responses toward emerging emotional facial expressions. Higher BIS sensitivity and being male are associated with greater avoidant responses toward emerging sad expressions of females, whereas strong stereotypical gender associations predict greater avoidant responses toward emerging sad expressions of males. Behavioral responses toward happy and angry faces were not predicted by the individual difference variables when they were simultaneously controlled for. Without controlling for the other factors, BIS sensitivity predicts avoidance for each emotion, particularly anger. These results, as well as their limitations and implications, are discussed in terms of emotion perception theory.