Interpreting President Barack Obama's Facial Displays of Emotion: Revisiting the Dartmouth Group

Abstract

Charismatic presidents like John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and now Barack Obama have been able to overcome stereotype-based barriers to political power by connecting emotionally with viewers, particularly through their nonverbal skills. In this study we focus on the facial displays of emotion by President Obama and how participants interpret them. This study builds upon the pioneering research of the Dartmouth Group concerning response to displays of happiness-reassurance by political leaders. It will first replicate and extend upon existing research by using Ekman and Friesen's Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to characterize facial displays by President Obama, specifically three neutral displays and three different types of smiles. Second, this study replicates research carried out over two decades ago concerning individual differences in sex, ethnicity, and age cohort on response to political candidates culturally defined as Black. Video focusing on the head and torso were FACS coded and presented in a web-based experiment to 79 participants working at a southern institution of higher education. The participants identified the emotions felt by President Obama on a scale ranging from "not at all" to "extremely" focusing on the basic emotion terms of: "Happy" and "Playful" (happiness-reassurance) and " Angry" and "Disgusted" (anger-threat). Findings suggest participants differentiate between subtle facial-display differences and that there are differences based upon ethnicity and support for President Obama when they interpret his facial displays of emotion.

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“…As a result, self-presentation and connection with the audience, both live at the debate venue and watching via mass media (Peifer and Holbert 2013), is important for conveying personality and character-of which nonverbal behavior plays an important role. Competing candidates walk a fine line between assertiveness and politeness toward their opponents (Bull and Wells 2002;Dailey, Hinck, and Hinck 2005;Pfau and Rang 1991;Seiter and Weger 2005;Seiter et al 2010) in which mastery of their facial displays (Newton et al 1987;Patterson et al 1992;Stewart 2012;Stewart and Ford Dowe 2013;Stewart, Salter, and Mehu 2009;Sullivan and Masters 1988), body language (Dumitrescu, Gidengil, and Stolle 2015;Gentry and Duke 2009;Koppensteiner and Grammer 2010;Koppensteiner, Stephan, and J€ aschke 2015;Kramer, Arend, and Ward 2010), and vocal behavior (Gentry and Duke 2009;Kalkhoff and Gregory 2008) plays a key role in viewer assessment.…”

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“…Activation of muscular controls of the lower face thus appear to dampen the perceived positivity of the individual displaying the smile with observers likely to perceive mixed emotion. 90 …”

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“…Here, Obama's looking downward in Clip 4 (Table 6.1 & Figure 6.1) led to a majority of participants perceiving him as feeling happiness despite there not being muscle movements associated with happiness (Stewart, Bucy, & Mehu, 2015;Stewart & Ford Dowe, 2013). Instead, the angle of the face downward likely led to the lip-corner tightening (AU 14), which is associated with negative emotions such as anger and contempt, being seen as a smile, even a smirk.…”