ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
The fear gasping face as a threat display in a Melanesian society.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Training reduces error in rating the intensity of emotions.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2022Trial
- Dynamic emotion fabric theory: a new framework for understanding the biology of flexible emotion states.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Review
- Real-life intense fear is communicated through context, not facial expressions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Sounds like a fight: listeners can infer behavioural contexts from spontaneous nonverbal vocalisations.Cognition & emotion · 2024Article
- What We Can Learn About Emotion by Talking With the Hadza.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Four Misconceptions About Nonverbal Communication.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Article
- A database of heterogeneous faces for studying naturalistic expressions.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Context reconsidered: Complex signal ensembles, relational meaning, and population thinking in psychological science.The American psychologist · 2022Article
- Acquiring Complex Communicative Systems: Statistical Learning of Language and Emotion.Topics in cognitive science · 2022Review
- Can we get human nature right?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- The spatial distribution of eye movements predicts the (false) recognition of emotional facial expressions.PloS one · 2021Article
- Investigating Emotion Perception via the Two-Dimensional Affect and Feeling Space: An Example of a Cross-Cultural Study Among Chinese and Non-Chinese Participants.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- An Emotion Assessment of Stroke Patients by Using Bispectrum Features of EEG Signals.Brain sciences · 2020Article
- A sensorimotor control framework for understanding emotional communication and regulation.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2020Review
- Toward an Integrative Psychometric Model of Emotions.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2020Article
- Cultural variation in young children's social motivation for peer collaboration and its relation to the ontogeny of Theory of Mind.PloS one · 2020Article
- Developing an Understanding of Emotion Categories: Lessons from Objects.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2020Review
- Are there non-verbal signals of guilt?PloS one · 2020Article
- Attentional Bias to Facial Expressions of Different Emotions - A Cross-Cultural Comparison of ≠Akhoe Hai||om and German Children and Adolescents.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Words are a context for mental inference.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2019Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Theory and research show that humans attribute both emotions and intentions to others on the basis of facial behavior: A gasping face can be seen as showing "fear" and intent to submit. The assumption that such interpretations are pancultural derives largely from Western societies. Here, we report two studies conducted in an indigenous, small-scale Melanesian society with considerable cultural and visual isolation from the West: the Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Our multidisciplinary research team spoke the vernacular and had extensive prior fieldwork experience. In study 1, Trobriand adolescents were asked to attribute emotions, social motives, or both to a set of facial displays. Trobrianders showed a mixed and variable attribution pattern, although with much lower agreement than studies of Western samples. Remarkably, the gasping face (traditionally considered a display of fear and submission in the West) was consistently matched to two unpredicted categories: anger and threat. In study 2, adolescents were asked to select the face that was threatening; Trobrianders chose the "fear" gasping face whereas Spaniards chose an "angry" scowling face. Our findings, consistent with functional approaches to animal communication and observations made on threat displays in small-scale societies, challenge the Western assumption that "fear" gasping faces uniformly express fear or signal submission across cultures.
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