Facial Expression: Predicting and
promoting positive outcomes
Daniel Messinger, Ph.D.
New topics
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Emotional Intelligence
Positive Psychology
Psychobiology of morality
Sympathy and empathy
Mother-toddler talk
Emotion work Flight attendants
– Averill
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Tell me
their story
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Questions
• How might positive emotion and its
expression affect life outcomes?
• Describe how expressed emotion relates to
– Adolescent behavior problems
– The course of grieving in widows
– Life outcome in college women
• What is a functionalist emotion theory?
• What is emotion regulation?
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Positive Emotion
• The Broaden and Build Hypothesis
– Positive emotion perceptual and
cognitive expansion
• Frederickson (1998)
• “ positive emotions build personal resources by
fostering creative thinking, the readiness to take
advantage of opportunities, the strengthening of
social bonds, and the undoing of negative
emotions.” Harker et al., 2001
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Positive Emotions Trigger Upward Spirals
Fredrickson & Joiner (2002)
Coping
Positive Affect
= 5 weeks
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One Mechanism: Undoing
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Facial expressions and outcomes
• Facial expressions
– Convey emotion and orientation
– Elicit emotion and behavior in others
• Social referencing and the visual cliff
• Smiling is contagious
– But so is scowling
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Data
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Kindergarten
Adolescent behavior
Bereavement
Year book photos
Discussion of intervention strategies
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Kindergarteners’ Family & School Photos
• Cross-modality emotional communication
 Smile intensity in classroom & home
 Warm family touch & smile intensity
• in classroom & home
 Total family touch & smile intensity, parent’s affect
• Child-parent expressive similarity
 Father and child smile intensity
• Facial emotion display as “thin slice” of temperament?
 Smile intensity in classroom (not home) & extraversion
~ Girls’ warm family touch & extraversion
Fuccillo
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Adolescents
• Take an interactive IQ test
– Show embarrassment, anger, fear with
examiner
– Related to teacher ratings of
• Externalizing (aggression)
• Internalizing (anxiety, withdrawal, somaticizing)
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Expressions by behavior rating
1.5
0.5
0
-0.5
-1
Embarrassment
Anger
Fear
Why?
1
-1.5
Well Extern- InternAdjusted alizers Messinger
alizers
Keltner et al., 1999
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Recently bereaved
• Talk about their loss at 6, 14, & 25 months
• Angry facial expressions  Later grief
• Duchenne (cheek-raise) laughers  Later
– Higher emotional dissociation
– Report better association with significant other
– Viewed more positively by naïve observers
• Why?
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Duchenne laughter and
recovering from bereavement
0.7
Dissociation
0.5
Significant other
0.3
Strangers'
response
0.1
-0.1
-0.3
-0.5
-0.7
Laugh
NonLaugh
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Keltner et al., 1999
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Yearbook pictures
…and
life
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Smile intensity &
other-reported personality
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Smile intensity and Observer Expected
Interactions (n=114)
Observer Expectations
Positive emotional
expression
Expected positive
emotions
.70
Expected negative
emotions
-.57
Approach-acceptance
.52
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Smile intensity and Life Outcomes
Life Outcome
Positive
expression
Married by age 27
.19
Controlling for
Attract./Social
Desirability
.18/.16
Single into adulthood
-.20
-.18/.20
Ever divorced
.15
~.15/~.15
.20
.25
.18
.20/.11
.26./.23
.19/12
.27
.28/.24
Personal Well-being
Age 21 (n=112)
Age 27 (n=86)
Age 43 (n=105)
Age 52 (n=101)
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Intervening with children’s emotions
Izard: Structural model and
intervention
In children
• Emotion knowledge  Social skills
– Unidirectional, .12,
– Effect on social preference of others is through
social skills
• (Mostow et al)
• What is emotional intelligence
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Emotion communication and
understanding in childhood:
A real-life problem
Saarni
Alternative views
• Functional
– Insight: Recognition of function of emotions and their
flexibility in functioning
• Regulating emotion to achieve goals
– Difficulty: Use goals to interpret behavior but use
behavior to infer goals
• Dynamic
– Insight: Recognition of interfacing role of multiple
components in emotional process
– Difficulty: Specifying process
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Functionalist theory
• Emotion is the person’s attempt or readiness to
establish, maintain, or change the relation between
the person and the environment on matters of
significance to that person (Saarni et al., 1998).
– Emotion is associated with goal-attainment, social
relationships, situational appraisals, action tendencies,
self-understanding, self regulation, etc.
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Halloween Candy
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOlpdd
7y8MI
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Critique of functionalism
• Definition is overly broad
• Circular reasoning
– How do you measure goals?
• What is a functionalist analysis of emotion
in face-to-face play?
• Measurement of impact of emotional signal
– Similar to ethology
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Functionalist views
• Emotions come in families defined by these
goals
– not by facial expression, or brain activity
– Messinger’s research is based on families of
expressions and emotions
• Functional research focus
• socialization of emotional experience
• acquisition of emotional competence (Saarni),
• secondary emotions such as pride.
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Emotion regulation
• Modifying emotions to attain goals
• Sees emotions as
– flexible not stereotypical
– functional not disruptive
– responsive not rigid
• E.g., Impulse control, anger modulation, embarrassment,
gift receipt.
– Flows from functional perspective
• See Thompson
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Critique of emotion regulation
• Inhibition or maintenance/intensification?
• Self or other regulation?
• What’s emotion and what’s its regulation?
– Does functionalism wish to unite concepts?
– Is a regulated emotion the same emotion?
– Avoid premature judgements of good emotion
regulation before we know its normative development
and how to measure its adequacy
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Emotion regulation
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Understanding emotions
Gender socialization
Cultural emotion scripts
Regulation and coping
Empathy vs. sympathy
Dissembling
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Themes
• Understanding emotions:
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Developing complex accounts
Symbolizing internal experience
Self-awareness in guilt and shame
Multiple emotions: sequential and simultaneous
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Socialization and scripts
• Family rules
– High frequency emotion talk
– Dysregulation caused by others’ anger and
abuse
• Boys’ anger; girls’ distress
• Empathy vs. sympathy
• Dissembling
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