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Friends of the Nonverbal Communication Club, this week we present the paper “The effect of optimism on the facial expression of pain: Implications for pain communication” by Basten- Günther, J.; Kunz, M.; Peters, M. and Lautenbacher, S. (2021), in which authors carry out an experiment to know wether optimism affects the facial expression of pain, and if it does, how it happens. 

Optimism is usually defined as the positive expectations we may have about the future. It has been shown to have numerous positive health-related effects, for example in treating diseases such as cancer or cardiovascular problems.

There are also many studies that explore the idea that optimism helps with pain. However, there are no consistent results. There are indications about that optimism leads to “catastrophize” less when pain is felt, which, in turn, may reduce pain reporting.

Since optimism apparently has health benefits, many experts have investigated how to induce it. One of the proposed techniques would be “The best possible self” (BPS for its acronym). It consists of imagining and writing about a future in which everything is going well for oneself. There are several studies that show that this technique has been successful.

However, one of the aspects that we find most interesting, like the authors, is to study facial reactions during pain and see if they vary when optimism comes into play.

The idea that optimism affects the facial expression of pain has to do with the fact that numerous studies have revealed that facial reactions to the latter can be influenced by cognitive and affective factors, such as fear.

They also vary with social context. For example, the socio-evolutionary function of the facial expression of pain is to warn another person, ask for help or compassion. This data can be related to optimism because it has been associated with searching for social support. Consequently, the facial expression of pain could be influenced by optimism.

How? There can be two opposite effects. The first is that the facial expression of pain could be weakened after the induction of the state of optimism, as a consequence of a decrease in the experience of pain. On the other hand, since optimism is also associated with greater confidence in the social environment, causing people to express their weakness and ask for help, optimism could lead to greater facial expressiveness of pain.

Therefore, the objective of this study is to decide which of the two effects prevails.

In order to do this, a total of 40 people were recruited, all of them healthy and without pain. They were asked not to take alcohol, pain relievers, or any psychotropic drug that could ease an experience of pain. They were given a monetary reward at the end of the experiment.

People were divided into two groups: one of them would be manipulated into optimism and the other would be the control group.

The participants underwent thermal stimulation to the arm, which would cause a level of pain sufficient to be noticeable but not excessively uncomfortable. Their facial activity and heart rate were recorded and, in addition, self-reports were made.

The group that was subjected to a manipulation for the induction of optimism, did the exercise of the BPS technique, where they wrote about their future life imagining everything turns out well, just as they want. The other group had to write about a typical day in their life.

The participants’ faces were recorded during heat stimulation. To avoid the effects of social desirability on facial expressions, participants were told that the main focus of interest was heart rate measurement. They were also told not to speak during heat stimulation.

Facial expressions were coded from video recordings, using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) by Ekman and Friesen, which, as we already know, is based on an anatomical analysis of facial movements and distinguishes a series of action units produced by the muscles of the face.

The obtained results showed that optimism does affect the facial expression of pain. How? Releasing the brake that normally holds this expression. Authors found that changes in facial responses to pain depend on the presence of other people. Facial responses were significantly stronger in the presence of people with whom we have an intimate relationship, such as our partner, compared to the conditions in which the directors of the experiment were present.

Optimism, thus, can lead to a greater communicative openness as expectations about the present social context become more positive. If one is in a state of optimism, he/she may be inclined to expect empathy and help from others, rather than rejection, and thus, be more willing to show one’s pain through facial responses.

A finding authors point out is that the increase in facial expression of pain as a consequence of induced optimism was observed mainly in two action units of the FACS: AU4 (frown) and AU6 and 7 (squinted eyes).

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Friends of the Nonverbal Communication Blog, this week we present the paper “Eye size affects cuteness in different facial expressions and ages”, by Yao, L.; Dai, Q.; Wu, Q.; Liu, Y.; Yu, Y.; Guo, T.; Zhou, M.; Yang, J.; Takahashi, S.; Ejima, Y. and Wu, J. (2022), in which authors carry out two experiments to investigate how the size of the eyes affects the perception of tenderness. 

The face is a special visual stimulus, with which we are familiar, and which is capable of transmitting emotional information to others, such as tenderness and beauty.

Tenderness is a positive stimulus that is often elicited by looking at human babies or young animals. And this may be related to the fact that the raison d’être of tenderness is the search for empathy and compassion from the observers, because human and animal babies need more care at their early age. This is consistent with the findings of some studies, which have shown that the perception of cuteness we have when we see children, declines as they grow older and become more autonomous and independent.

Lorenz described, around the 1940s, the existence of a “baby schema”, which would be an innate mechanism to generate care behaviors, and would be made up of a set of infantile features, such as a large head and eyes, cheeks and plump body shape, small nose and mouth, and short, stubby limbs. These characteristics would put the mechanism into operation, considering the children who possess them cuter, and attracting the attention and care of adults.

Another study added that the cuteness elicited by the “baby schema” was not just limited to babies, but also adults who possess these traits are also considered cuter.

But, speaking about the whole face, what is the feature that usually attracts our attention? The eyes, indeed. They are a tremendously important facial feature. Emery argued that the eyes contain the most important information about a person’s identity and his/her emotional state.

In a 2014 study cited in the article, photographs of baby faces were divided into three zones: eyes, nose, and mouth. The number of fixations and the duration of fixations were measured, and the results showed that the observers focused longer and more frequently on the eyes.

In addition, other studies have shown that the first thing babies look at when they see people is the eyes, which helps them recognize faces.

This aroused the interest of the authors and, in this article, they decided to investigate whether the size of the eyes influences the level of tenderness that one person arouses in another.

To do this, two experiments were carried out, in which a total of 24 university students participated. 229 photographs were shown to them, previously configured in gray scale.

In them, appeared, on the one hand, faces of adults between 20 and 30 years old, with three different expressions: positive (smiling), neutral and negative (sad). On the other hand, the same type of images were observed, divided into positive, neutral and negative, of the faces of babies between 4 months and 1 year. In addition, both adults and babies had their eyes modified so that within each category (positive, neutral, or negative expression), there were three variations: small, medium, and large eyes.

That is, for the photographs of adults, the subjects found: faces with positive expression and small eyes, faces with positive expression and medium eyes, faces with positive expression and large eyes, and so on with the rest of the expressions.

In the first of the experiments, the subjects had to make a comparison between the faces of the adults with the difference in the size of the eyes, and after that they had to say which one was more pleasant or caused them more tenderness. They did the same with the photographs of the babies’ faces.

In the second experiment, they compared the photos of the adults with the photos of the babies and rated the cuteness.

The main finding of the study is that, in both adults and babies, the size of the eyes has a significant effect on cuteness, in all three types of expressions. The bigger, the cuter.

In the comparison between adults, it was shown that only by changing the size of the eyes, the perception of tenderness changes. That is, an adult with larger eyes seems to be cuter than an adult with medium or small eyes.

However, the results seemed to indicate that the change in cuteness caused by eye size did not make adults cuter than babies.

As indicated before, tenderness is a protection mechanism for babies and children to attract attention and care, so this last idea makes sense if we bear in mind this information. 

We have also mentioned that in other studies it was seen that the eyes are the part of the face to which we pay the most attention. So, it seems logical that when the size of these increases, so does the attention of the observer.

Authors point out that it would be interesting to continue advancing in the research on this topic, to solve some of the limitations of these experiments, such as the small number of participating subjects.

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Friends of the Nonverbal Communication Blog, this week we present the paper “Does attention to one’s own emotion relate to the emotional interpretation of other people’s faces?”, by Munin, S. and Beer, J. S. (2022), in which authors carry out a couple of studies to know whether, as it seems logical, a positive association exists between giving attention to our own emotions and correctly inferring other’s emotions judging by their facial expressions.

Because of the interest in nonverbal communication in recent years, some experts have asked an apparently logical question: does people’s tendency to pay attention to their own emotions predict their ability to correctly perceive the emotions of others? 

Research has shown that, from childhood through adulthood, people tend to watch the expressions on the faces of others for clues about how they may be feeling, but there are few studies that focus on whether a relationship as described above exists. 

Although no research has directly examined attention to one’s own emotions in relation to the perception of others’, it is possible to extrapolate hypotheses from previous research on individual differences in attention to emotions and how this is associated with categorization, also of emotions. 

One of these is the possibility that individuals with greater attention to emotion have a greater ability to differentiate perceived facial expressions in others and may indicate the intensity or authenticity of those expressions. This is the idea we mentioned above, since it is the one that comes to mind when we think about the subject, but is it true?

What we know is that people with greater attention to emotions more often control their own emotions, are more likely to be driven by them, and also have a greater tendency to use their moods as a basis for making decisions. 

However, it is not so simple when it comes to other people’s emotions, a topic on which more research is needed. 

With the existing articles and publications, some hypotheses can be developed. First, it appears that individuals who pay more attention to emotions would show a greater ability to differentiate cues that report emotional intensity and authenticity. Second, they also appear to be able to more accurately label another person’s emotions. Finally, there is other research claiming that these people may overestimate the authenticity of the emotions they see in the faces of others. 

To clarify these issues, the authors decided to conduct two studies. The first study examined whether individual differences in attention to emotions are significantly related to perceptions of the intensity and authenticity of emotions in other people. 

A total of 256 people participated. In the experiment, they viewed 48 images of randomly presented facial expressions with the emotions of anger, happiness or sadness, and rated their emotional intensity. On the other hand, they saw 10 randomly presented pictures of smiles, 5 of them were “Duchenne smiles”, and subjects had to rate the authenticity of all of them. 

The second study was very similar to the first one. It had 254 participants, who completed an online survey with emotional intensity tasks, related tests, demographic questions, among others. 

The observed results were not consistent with the hypotheses suggested by previous research. In study 1, it was found that the ability to pay attention to one’s own emotions did not significantly moderate the ability to perceive others’ emotional intensity or authenticity.

Furthermore, perceptions of emotions from other people’s faces are not always accurate, and perceivers often make biased interpretations. 

Future research may investigate situations in which the facial behavior of others is very brief, or also take into account these biases that may appear when interpreting facial expressions and identifying them. 

As future research broadens its focus and pays attention to how individual differences in attention to emotion may shape the interpretation of facial movements, it may also consider new hypotheses and, with them, lead, in turn, to other relevant and important research. 

If you want to know more about nonverbal behavior and how it influences our personal relationships, visit our Nonverbal Communication Certificate, a 100% online program certificated by the Heritage University (Washington) with special discounts for readers of the Nonverbal Communication Blog.

 


The analysis of nonverbal behavior is a competitive advantage in any field. If you want to develop this skill, the Master in Nonverbal Behavior is your best option. Study 100% online and earn a degree from Evidentia University, a university licensed in the United States, ensuring internationally recognized education. Start your training from just $208 USD per month.

Friends of the Nonverbal Communication Blog, this week we present the paper “Communication and Emotional Vocabulay; Relevance for Mental Health Among School-Age Youths”, by Rimehaug, T. y Karstad, S. B. (2022), in which authors carry out a study to know whether it is important for children’s and teenagers’ mental health to have a rich and quality emotional vocabulary. 

Through the different posts of this blog we have seen how nonverbal language is immensely important for communication to exist, and a correct understanding of it contributes to effective and satisfactory interactions.

But what about verbal behavior? How does it affect our relationships, our way of developing individually or collectively? How does it affect our mental health?

There is a widespread assumption that language is important to mental health in several ways: both because of the influence of language on human development, and because of the influence of mental health on our communication.

In other words, good language development is normally expected to be a protective factor against mental health problems since it contributes to, for example, having good social functioning or the ability to solve cognitive problems more easily.

However, language and communication can also increase the ability to ruminate, misunderstandings, social conflicts…

Unraveling which aspects of language and communication are the most important is something that is still in progress. But the aspects that are proposed as such, may be its variety and richness, as well as its complexity; the understanding of emotional concepts and expressions, or the understanding of social mechanisms and processes.

In spite of this, it has been shown that vocabulary, specifically emotional vocabulary, acts as a resource to contribute to the proper development of social function, by improving prosocial behavior, reducing the risk of victimization and rejection, etc.

Furthermore, emotional language can express emotions and inform us about the emotional reactions of others in social interaction; also listening carefully to our emotional speech, which can influence our emotions.

Therefore, both positive and negative mental health could be related to language and communication, and possibly more to emotional communication. Therefore, it is possible that a rich and nuanced emotional vocabulary could be beneficial for mental health, serving for emotional regulation and social support, although there is also the possibility of using language in ways that create or exaggerate mental health problems.

It has been shown that those who receive mental health interventions (psychotherapy) are able to change and improve their mental health through emotional understanding and communication skills, more than those who don’t receive psychotherapy. 

In psychotherapy, this is often referred to as “the talk cure.” In fact, language has played a very important role in psychotherapy from its beginnings until the recent advances in cognitive-behavioral therapy. This happens because psychotherapy often focuses on finding words and narratives that can express and clarify life experiences, even shape or reinterpret them.

In these processes, poor emotional language can be an obstacle, and for this reason it is something that develops as the sessions progress.

In the current study, authors focused specifically on the associations between positive and negative mental health (understanding the former as prosocial behaviors, and the latter as emotional or behavioral problems) and emotional vocabulary.

There are relatively few studies investigating the specific role of emotional vocabulary in mental health. Authors hypothesized that emotional vocabulary might be more important for mental health than general vocabulary, thus, they could be a specific resource beyond intelligence and communication skills.

The study used a free labeling task, in which a series of words and phrases were used to describe facial expressions commonly associated with emotions. 410 students between 10 and 16 years old participated, accompanied by their parents.

The results indicated that emotional vocabulary in youth between 10-16 years is not a general resource for mental health, and the same would apply to vocabulary in general.

However, pragmatic language, skills to communicate effectively, were negatively associated with behavior problems and hyperactivity, while the same was not true for emotional and social problems.

Pragmatic skills were also positively associated with prosocial behavior, indicating that they are a resource factor for positive aspects of mental health.

In short, emotional vocabulary did not show a stronger association with mental health than general vocabulary, but pragmatic skills, in part, did.

The suggestion is that expanding emotional vocabulary per se is unlikely to improve mental health unless vocabulary expansion is integrated with improvements in social communication.

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Friends of the Nonverbal Communication Blog, this week we present the paper “Effects of color-emotion association on facial expression judgments”, by Takei, A. and Imaizumi, S. (2022), in which authors carry out a couple of experiments to investigate how some colors are associated to emotions when it comes about inferring these from facial expressions. 

Human beings often express emotions by linking them to colors in our day-to-day conversations. For example, in English and Japanese, the color blue is widely used to express sadness (“I’m feeling blue”).

However, we also associate emotions with the visual perception of colors. For example, in WhatsApp we can use a red face emoticon to transmit anger. In fact, it is possible that because anger increases blood flow to the face, making it red, people have learned to see this color in an angry face.

All these linguistic and perceptual associations are part of the color-emotion associations.

Conceptual metaphor theory could explain the color-emotion association. According to this theory, to understand abstract concepts related to thought and action, humans apply the structures of other concrete concepts to specific abstract concepts, which are clear perceptual experiences. In other words, the metaphorical structures of concepts such as “sadness is blue” and “anger is red” facilitate the understanding of concepts related to emotions.

Because of such associations, color perception can remind people of corresponding emotions and even bias their judgments about the emotional stimuli they receive.

For example, in a 2020 study, participants tended to associate anger and love with red, sadness with gray, and joy with yellow. In another 2012 study, words written in red were linked to anger more quickly than words written in blue. This suggests that red is associated with anger and would improve linguistic processing related to it.

In terms of social cognition, it is important for humans to understand the emotional states of others. Facial expressions are especially useful for this, but other resources are also used. Similarly, the colors associated with emotions are also close to the recognition and judgment of emotions combined with facial expressions.

In a 2013 experiment, participants categorized angry faces against red, blue, or gray backgrounds. The results showed that the judgment of angry faces was faster against a red background, suggesting that the color facilitates the recognition of facial expressions.

In another experiment, this one from 2020, participants categorized images of faces and emoticons that represented happiness and anger on a red or green background. Images of anger were re-categorized more quickly correctly on the red background, the same thing happening with happiness and the color green.

Although previous studies like these have suggested color-emotion associations, some have been controversial, such as sadness and the color blue. In some countries there is an association between them, but in others it is associated with positive emotions. In a 2020 study it was suggested that gray was more related to sadness than the color blue, but this idea still needs to be explored further.

To delve into all this and find out which colors some emotions are associated with, the authors carried out a couple of experiments.

The first of them was carried out with 20 subjects and photographs of people showing happiness and sadness were used. They were placed on a yellow, blue or gray colored background, and the participants were asked to ignore the colors and judge whether the face expressed happiness or sadness.

Experiment two, involving 19 people, was the same as the first, except that the background color was shown slightly later than the face, superimposing the facial stimulus on the color stimulus.

The results suggest that yellow, which was thought to be associated with happiness, facilitates the judgment of happy facial expression, which is consistent with previous literature.

However, although blue and/or gray were expected to be associated with sadness, the results did not support this idea.

This is where conceptual metaphor theory comes in again, with the idea that “happiness is light” and “sadness is darkness.”

The contrast of joy and sadness can be interpreted not only as a different emotional valence, but also as extreme differences in brightness.

The results can be interpreted as suggesting that yellow facilitates the judgment of happiness because it activates a metaphorical “light-happiness” association that bright colors provide.

On the other hand, gray and blue might not be colors symbolic of darkness and, therefore, might not activate the “darkness-sadness” association.

Needs to be said that, thanks to experiment 2, it is suggested that the color-emotion association is stronger when color and emotion are perceptually experienced simultaneously.

Authors conclude that it would be very interesting to continue investigating how the luminance and brightness of colors affect the perception of emotions.

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Friends of the Nonverbal Communication Blog, this week we present the paper “Assessing pain by facial expression: Facial expression as nexus” de Prkachin, K. M. (2010) in which the author makes a revision about what are the movements that scientifically have been associated with pain through recent research.

When it comes about the study of nonverbal expressions of emotions, there is great interest in identifying the exact movements that represent each one of them.

The reality is that there is no completely precise answer, and there are many elements to pay attention to if we want to be able to say that we infer the presence of one or another emotion. Nevertheless, it is true that over recent years research with scientific validity has been carried out, in which we can observe a series of movements that are repeated in the expression of emotions.

Consequently, the author of this article wants to make a review of facial movements that have been associated with the emotion of pain.

Evolution has equipped us with complex systems for treating injuries, many of which depend on our behavior.

In the case of adults, there is a language that allows us to talk about pain, its causes, and the options to deal with it in the best way. If we talk about babies, it will be the parents who would have to describe the behaviors they use to infer whether their child is in pain or not. We can therefore affirm that behaviors related to pain are mainly communicative.

Charles Darwin, to whom we owe the first research about the facial expressions of emotions, mentioned that when it came about pain the mouth could be compressed, the lips were retracted, the teeth clenched, and the eyes opened with horror.

However, Darwin’s contribution to the study of pain expression, as well as his much broader contribution to the study of facial expressions, was largely forgotten for many years.

And although interest in studying emotional facial expressions was lost for a few years, there were some experts who took over from Darwin. For example, Hollander studied pain experimentally, placing a metal grater under a cuff to measure blood pressure and inflating it, watching the subjects wince at pain.

On the other hand, Chapman and Jones also conducted experimental studies on pain and observed a contraction of the eyelids in the outer area of ​​the eyes, even when they asked the subjects to try not to make any movement.

In a later work, also by Chapman, it was suggested that neurotic patients had a pain reaction to milder stimuli than other subjects.

These studies show that almost all inferences about pain arise from observations of behavior, so research focused on it and how to measure it.

As the behavior that was most recognized as a manifestation of pain was facial expression, it was the one that the experts chose to carry out most of the investigations. It thus offered a basis for establishing more objective measurement rules.

Among the attempts to classify facial expressions, the most influential and used by experts is the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) by Ekman and Friesen. In it, they describe facial expressions in 44 action units, which are changes produced by movements of facial muscles. From its creation, it was a way of measuring facial expressions that gradually gained strength among experts, who used it for their studies.

LeResche used the FACS to describe the facial expressions depicted in real photographs of people in extreme pain. He concluded that there was a characteristic expression of pain, which included the lowering of the eyebrows, the tight skin around the eyes and an open mouth, stretched horizontally, with a deepening of the nasolabial fold.

Craig and Patrick, on the other hand, and also using the FACS, reported that they observed, in pain, an elevation of the cheekbones, squeezing of the eyelids, elevation of the upper lip, and pulling of the corners of the lips.

As there was a relative coherence between all the empirical research on facial expressions associated with pain, the idea that there was a possibly universal expression for it gained weight.

Noting the success of the FACS, Grunau and Craig developed the Neonatal Facial Coding System (NFCS) for newborn children. These subjects have a skin and a neuromuscular system whose differences with those of adults make the application of the FACS complicated for both.

With this system, some elements that were associated with pain in young babies were identified, such as a bulging of the forehead, the contraction of the eyes, the deepening of the nasolabial fold or the opening of the lips.

There are, therefore, similarities between the facial actions associated with pain in adults and in newborns, which is why it is suggested that there is a continuity in the expression of this emotion from birth to maturity.

And since most of the actions associated with pain require the participation of the corrugator muscle, the orbicularis oculi, and the elevator, it is suggested that researchers interested in evaluating the expression of pain can focus their attention on this area of the face, where the key information concentrates.

One limitation of the FACS is that it takes a considerable amount of time to train on it. In addition, a quality observation time is also needed.

However, it is one of the most useful tools to study, know, identify and research on facial expressions so far.


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