Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions in Japanese Laypeople

Abstract

Facial expressions that show emotion play an important role in human social interactions. In previous theoretical studies, researchers have suggested that there are universal, prototypical facial expressions specific to basic emotions. However, the results of some empirical studies that tested the production of emotional facial expressions based on particular scenarios only partially supported the theoretical predictions. In addition, all of the previous studies were conducted in Western cultures. We investigated Japanese laypeople ( n = 65) to provide further empirical evidence regarding the production of emotional facial expressions. The participants produced facial expressions for six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) in specific scenarios. Under the baseline condition, the participants imitated photographs of prototypical facial expressions. The produced facial expressions were automatically coded using FaceReader in terms of the intensities of emotions and facial action units. In contrast to the photograph condition, where all target emotions were shown clearly, the scenario condition elicited the target emotions clearly only for happy and surprised expressions. The photograph and scenario conditions yielded different profiles for the intensities of emotions and facial action units associated with all of the facial expressions tested. These results provide partial support for the theory of universal, prototypical facial expressions for basic emotions but suggest the possibility that the theory may need to be modified based on empirical evidence.

The neural representation of facial-emotion categories reflects conceptual structure

“…Therefore, the images may primarily conform to Western norms and expectations about facial expressions. Indeed, some recent work shows that, when asked to pose emotion expressions, Japanese perceivers do not typically generate the stereotypical expressions associated with Western norms (91). Cross-cultural studies on emotion perception using more data-driven techniques to produce face stimuli have been able to estimate more nuanced patterns of consistency and discordance in facial-emotion displays between cultures (e.g., ref.…”

Read My Face: Automatic Facial Coding Versus Psychophysiological Indicators of Emotional Valence and Arousal

“…Converging evidence shows that automatic facial coding (AFC) provides sensitive and specific scores for emotional intensities, as well as associated AUs, in highly standardized and prototypical facial expression inventories for static photographs (Bijlstra and Dotsch, 2011;Mavadati et al, 2013;Lewinski et al, 2014;Lewinski, 2015) and dynamic videos (Calvo et al, 2018). Furthermore, these findings can also be generalized to tasks where facial expressions are mimicked by real persons (Stöckli et al, 2018;Beringer et al, 2019;Sato et al, 2019). Summarizing these results, pleasant facial expressions (happy) are detected with higher probabilities compared to unpleasant facial expressions (anger, sadness, disgust, or anxiety) and misattributions of specific emotions (e.g., surprise in scared faces) can be observed.…”

Biased Recognition of Surprised Facial Expressions Following Awake Craniotomy of a Right Temporal Lobe Tumor

“…In fact, the score of the control group for fearful expressions was relatively low (see Table 2), which suggests that there may have been a floor effect. Recent research suggests that Ekman’s six basic emotional expressions are not universal phenomena, including in Japanese people (Sato et al, 2019). This finding may affect lesion studies, including the present study, and therefore it is necessary to consider cultural differences in future studies.…”