What Scientists Who Study Emotion Agree About.

In recent years, the field of emotion has grown enormously-recently, nearly 250 scientists were identified who are studying emotion. In this article, I report a survey of the field, which revealed high agreement about the evidence regarding the nature of emotion, supporting some of both Darwin's and Wundt's 19th century proposals. Topics where disagreements remain were also exposed.

Anticipatory sensitization to repeated stressors: the role of initial cortisol reactivity and meditation/emotion skills training.

Anticipation may play a role in shaping biological reactions to repeated stressors-a common feature of modern life. We aimed to demonstrate that: (a) individuals who display a larger cortisol response to an initial stressor exhibit progressive anticipatory sensitization, showing progressively higher cortisol levels before subsequent exposures, and (b) attention/emotional skills training can reduce the magnitude of this effect on progressive anticipatory sensitization. Female school teachers (N=76) were randomly assigned to attention/emotion skills and meditation training or to a control group. Participants completed 3 separate Trier Social Stress Tests (TSST): at baseline (Session 1), post-training (Session 2), and five months post (Session 3). Each TSST session included preparing and delivering a speech and performing an arithmetic task in front of critical evaluators. In each session participants' salivary cortisol levels were determined before and after the stressor. Control participants with larger cortisol reactivity to the first stressor showed increasing anticipatory (pre-stressor) cortisol levels with each successive stressor exposure (TSST session)-suggesting progressive anticipatory sensitization. Yet this association was absent in the training group. Supplementary analyses indicated that these findings occurred in the absence of group differences in cortisol reactivity. Findings suggest that the stress response can undergo progressive anticipatory sensitization, which may be modulated by attention/emotion-related processes. An important implication of the construct of progressive anticipatory sensitization is a possible self-perpetuating effect of stress reactions, providing a candidate mechanism for the translation of short-to-long-term stress reactions.

Meditation and the startle response: a case study.

The effects of two kinds of meditation (open presence and focused) on the facial and physiological aspects of the defensive response to an aversive startle stimulus were studied in a Buddhist monk with approximately 40 years of meditation experience. The participant was exposed to a 115-db, 100-ms acoustic startle stimulus under the 2 meditation conditions, a distraction condition (to control for cognitive and attentional load) and an unanticipated condition (startle presented without warning or instruction). A completely counterbalanced 24-trial, single-subject design was used, with each condition repeated 6 times. Most aspects of the participant's responses in the unanticipated condition did not differ from those of a comparison group of 12 age-matched male controls. Both kinds of meditation produced physiological and facial responses to the startle that were smaller than in the distraction condition. Within meditation conditions, open presence meditation produced smaller physiological and facial responses than focused meditation. These results from a single highly expert meditator indicate that these 2 kinds of meditation can differentially alter the magnitude of a primitive defensive response.

Contemplative/emotion training reduces negative emotional behavior and promotes prosocial responses.

Contemplative practices are believed to alleviate psychological problems, cultivate prosocial behavior and promote self-awareness. In addition, psychological science has developed tools and models for understanding the mind and promoting well-being. Additional effort is needed to combine frameworks and techniques from these traditions to improve emotional experience and socioemotional behavior. An 8-week intensive (42 hr) meditation/emotion regulation training intervention was designed by experts in contemplative traditions and emotion science to reduce "destructive enactment of emotions" and enhance prosocial responses. Participants were 82 healthy female schoolteachers who were randomly assigned to a training group or a wait-list control group, and assessed preassessment, postassessment, and 5 months after training completion. Assessments included self-reports and experimental tasks to capture changes in emotional behavior. The training group reported reduced trait negative affect, rumination, depression, and anxiety, and increased trait positive affect and mindfulness compared to the control group. On a series of behavioral tasks, the training increased recognition of emotions in others (Micro-Expression Training Tool), protected trainees from some of the psychophysiological effects of an experimental threat to self (Trier Social Stress Test; TSST), appeared to activate cognitive networks associated with compassion (lexical decision procedure), and affected hostile behavior in the Marital Interaction Task. Most effects at postassessment that were examined at follow-up were maintained (excluding positive affect, TSST rumination, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia recovery). Findings suggest that increased awareness of mental processes can influence emotional behavior, and they support the benefit of integrating contemplative theories/practices with psychological models and methods of emotion regulation.

Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations.

Emotional signals are crucial for sharing important information, with conspecifics, for example, to warn humans of danger. Humans use a range of different cues to communicate to others how they feel, including facial, vocal, and gestural signals. We examined the recognition of nonverbal emotional vocalizations, such as screams and laughs, across two dramatically different cultural groups. Western participants were compared to individuals from remote, culturally isolated Namibian villages. Vocalizations communicating the so-called "basic emotions" (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) were bidirectionally recognized. In contrast, a set of additional emotions was only recognized within, but not across, cultural boundaries. Our findings indicate that a number of primarily negative emotions have vocalizations that can be recognized across cultures, while most positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals.

Darwin's contributions to our understanding of emotional expressions.

Darwin charted the field of emotional expressions with five major contributions. Possible explanations of why he was able to make such important and lasting contributions are proposed. A few of the important questions that he did not consider are described. Two of those questions have been answered at least in part; one remains a major gap in our understanding of emotion.

From flawed self-assessment to blatant whoppers: the utility of voluntary and involuntary behavior in detecting deception.

Malingering occupies a range on a continuum from biased self-perception to conscious, deliberate, serious lies. One aspect of this continuum is the element of self-conscious or deliberate control. Suggestions from Darwin's writings concerning the role of voluntary and involuntary activation of the facial muscles are examined and illustrated with data from a 40 year program of research on deception. The impact of the voluntary-involuntary distinction on the appearance, timing, symmetry and cohesion of facial expressions of emotion is explained. Data relevant to changes in vocal and gestural aspects of demeanor in honest and deceptive behavior are also reviewed. The relevance of these laboratory-based findings on the voluntary control of nonverbal behavior in assessing some types of malingering is discussed.

Detecting lies in children and adults.

In this study, observers' abilities to detect lies in children and adults were examined. Adult participants observed videotaped interviews of both children and adults either lying or telling the truth about having been touched by a male research assistant. As hypothesized, observers detected children's lies more accurately than adults' lies; however, adults' truthful statements were detected more accurately than were children's. Further analyses revealed that observers were biased toward judging adults' but not children's statements as truthful. Finally, consistent with the notion that there are stable individual differences in the ability to detect lies, observers who were highly accurate in detecting children's lies were similarly accurate in detecting adults' lies. Implications of these findings for understanding lie-detection accuracy are discussed, as are potential applications to the forensic context.

The relationship among expressions, labels, and descriptions of contempt.

This article reports 4 studies that demonstrate that the contempt expression is reliably associated with situations that elicit contempt and that the inability to label the contempt expression reflects a problem with its label or concept and not with the relationship between its expression and emotion. In Study I, the labeling of contempt in fixed-choice judgment tasks did not occur because of a process of elimination. In Studies 2 and 3, the contempt expression was associated with situations that elicit contempt, but participants did not label the situations in an open-ended response. In Study 3, participants also more reliably labeled the contempt expression with situations rather than with labels and did not generate contempt situations from labels. In Study 4, participants reported using, hearing, and reading about contempt the least among 7 emotions tested.

Appearing truthful generalizes across different deception situations.

The authors investigated whether the ability to appear truthful is specific to deception situations. Male participants were interrogated after they took part in 2 high-stake deception situations, one involving a mock crime and another involving a false opinion. The videotaped interrogations from each situation were shown to independent groups of undergraduate observers. The proportion of observers who judged each participant as truthful in one situation correlated highly with the proportion of observers who judged the same participant as truthful in the other situation. This was not correlated with physiognomy judgments. Follow-up studies revealed that although the participants showed consistency in their facial, body, and paralinguistic behaviors across situations, observers' judgments seemed to be driven only by the consistency of the dynamic facial behaviors. These results are discussed in terms of the evolutionary importance of the face in communication.

Darwin, deception, and facial expression.

Darwin did not focus on deception. Only a few sentences in his book mentioned the issue. One of them raised the very interesting question of whether it is difficult to voluntarily inhibit the emotional expressions that are most difficult to voluntarily fabricate. Another suggestion was that it would be possible to unmask a fabricated expression by the absence of the difficult-to-voluntarily-generate facial actions. Still another was that during emotion body movements could be more easily suppressed than facial expression. Research relevant to each of Darwin's suggestions is reviewed, as is other research on deception that Darwin did not foresee.

Difficulty does not account for emotion-specific heart rate changes in the directed facial action task.

Boiten (1996) used the Directed Facial Action task (a task we developed in which participants follow instructions, based on theory about how emotion is expressed in the face, to move facial muscles deliberately to produce different facial configurations) to investigate heart rate differences among six emotional configurations. Boiten's findings closely replicated ours (Levenson, Ekman, & Friesen, 1990) in terms of heart rate change, self-reported emotion, and rated difficulty during the configurations. Boiten concluded that differences in difficulty were responsible for found differences in heart rate; in contrast, we had concluded that heart rate findings could not be explained in this manner. In this paper, we argue that neither Boiten nor we did the critical analyses needed to determine whether heart rate changes were mediated in this way. Performing these analyses, we conclude that neither reported difficulty nor two other potential mediators (time required to make the facial configurations; activity of nonfacial muscles) mediated the heart rate differences that we found between emotional configurations in the Directed Facial Action task.

Classifying Facial Actions.

The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) [23] is an objective method for quantifying facial movement in terms of component actions. This system is widely used in behavioral investigations of emotion, cognitive processes, and social interaction. The coding is presently performed by highly trained human experts. This paper explores and compares techniques for automatically recognizing facial actions in sequences of images. These techniques include analysis of facial motion through estimation of optical flow; holistic spatial analysis, such as principal component analysis, independent component analysis, local feature analysis, and linear discriminant analysis; and methods based on the outputs of local filters, such as Gabor wavelet representations and local principal components. Performance of these systems is compared to naive and expert human subjects. Best performances were obtained using the Gabor wavelet representation and the independent component representation, both of which achieved 96 percent accuracy for classifying 12 facial actions of the upper and lower face. The results provide converging evidence for the importance of using local filters, high spatial frequencies, and statistical independence for classifying facial actions.