ArticleNature communications2021
Professional actors demonstrate variability, not stereotypical expressions, when portraying emotional states in photographs.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Behavioral characterization of dynamic facial expression perception in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) using naturalistic and synthetic stimuli.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Adolescents and Adults Use Different Facial Movements and Vocal Cues to Express Emotions.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Rethinking Ethics for an Era of Trusted Computational Tools.The Psychiatric clinics of North America · 2026Review
- Preliminary evidence of kinematic overlap in posed, but not spontaneous, facial expressions of fear and surprise.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Spatiotemporal dynamics and substates underlie emotional signalling in facial movements.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The inadequacy of normative ratings for building stimulus sets in affective science.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Stakeholder Perspectives on Humanistic Implementation of Computer Perception in Health Care: Qualitative Study.JMIR mental health · 2026Article
- 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
- The portrait of Dorian Gray: spontaneous expression of happiness is an invariant kinematic marker.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Elevated Facial Behavior Variability During Emotions Contributes to Better Functional Communication in Dyslexia.Journal of nonverbal behavior · 2025Article
- Individual differences in emotion prediction and implications for social success.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Article
- Facial representations of complex affective states combining pain and a negative emotion.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Face and context integration in emotion inference is limited and variable across categories and individuals.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Why the Single-N Design Should Be the Default in Affective Neuroscience.Affective science · 2024Review
- Article
- How emotion is experienced and expressed in multiple cultures: a large-scale experiment across North America, Europe, and Japan.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Emotional event perception is related to lexical complexity and emotion knowledge.Communications psychology · 2023Article
- Development of the RIKEN database for dynamic facial expressions with multiple angles.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Facial Movements Reveals the Left Side of a Posed Smile.Biology · 2023Article
- A database of heterogeneous faces for studying naturalistic expressions.Scientific reports · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
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.
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