Understanding the Mechanisms Underlying the Production of Facial Expression of Emotion: A Componential Perspective

Abstract

We highlight the need to focus on the underlying determinants and production mechanisms to fully understand the nature of facial expression of emotion and to settle the theoretical debate about the meaning of motor expression. Although emotion theorists have generally remained rather vague about the details of the process, this has been a central concern of componential appraisal theories. We describe the fundamental assumptions and predictions of this approach regarding the patterning of facial expressions for different emotions. We also review recent evidence for the assumption that specific facial muscle movements may be reliable symptoms of certain appraisal outcomes and that facial expressions unfold over time on the basis of a sequence of appraisal check results.

Emotions: Methods of Assessment

“…The later study also revealed that cheek raise is associated with the appraisals of intrinsic pleasantness and goal conduciveness. Evidence in support of this model also comes from psychophysiological research in which a variety of AUs have been related to the outcome of appraisal processes (for a brief review of this literature, see Scherer et al, 2013b).…”

Facial Emotion Expression, Individual Differences in

“…Furthermore, these studies mainly used expression recognition paradigms to study the nature and function of facial expressions. Marking the onset of a new research epoch, a series of contributions to a recent special section published in Emotion Review 2013 emphasized (1) the need for a theoretical model to explain the expression production mechanism and formulated (2) a desideratum for considering the dynamics of facial expression production (e.g., Fernández-Dols, 2013;Scherer et al, 2013).…”

An Automatic Multilevel Facial Expression Recognition System

“…In 1872, Darwin theory [1] stated that facial expressions display the internal feelings of a person, and, therefore, they have a relevant communicative role. Given their importance in conveying social information about a person and hisher interaction with the environment, facial expressions recognition is an active research field among researchers in psychology [2,3,4,5,6,7].…”