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Advances in the Study of Facial Expression: An Introduction to the Special Section

Jos-Miguel Fernndez-Dols
Emotion Review 2013 5: 3
DOI: 10.1177/1754073912457209
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457209

EMR5110.1177/1754073912457209Emotion ReviewFernndez-Dols

2013

SPECIAL SECTION: FACIAL EXPRESSIONS

Advances in the Study of Facial Expression:

An Introduction to the Special Section

Emotion Review
Vol. 5, No. 1 (January 2013) 37
The Author(s) 2013
ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/1754073912457209
er.sagepub.com

Jos-Miguel Fernndez-Dols

Facultad de Psicologa, Universidad Autnoma de Madrid, Spain

Abstract
For more than a century expressions have been approached as bidimensional, static, instantaneous, self-contained, well-defined,
and universal signals. These assumptions are starting to be empirically reconsidered: this special section of Emotion Review includes
reviews on the physical, social, and cultural dynamics of expressions, and on the complex ways in which, throughout the lifespan,
facial behavior and emotion are perceived and categorized by primates and humans brain. All these advances are certainly paving the
way for new exciting approaches to facial behavior more likely to strike an appropriate balance between description and explanation.

Keywords
emotion, expression

Kagan (2007) distinguishes two different strategies for the study

of emotion: in the topdown strategy, theory drives observation,
and categories fit into the a priori concepts of an explanatory
model. What the model gains in clarity of exposition and
straightforward tests of its hypotheses is, on the other hand, lost
in representativeness. Topdown strategies cannot provide a
proper explanation of those phenomena that are not included in
their a priori categories. The bottomup strategy requires a long
period of data collection in order to elaborate a theory that is as
inclusive as possible. What bottomup strategies gain in representativeness is lost in clarity and testability. Darwins development of his evolutionary theory is a prototypical example of the
second strategy. He spent no less than 20 years collecting data
and annotations in his notebooks before launching his theory.
These two conceptual strategies are complementary, and
they coincided for several years in the study of the expression of
emotion. During the 1970s and early 1980s ethology provided
field observations whose epitome is Eibl-Eibesfeldts (1989)
work on human behavior across an impressive number of
cultures. Around the same period, psychology followed the
topdown strategy, creating some parsimonious and attractive
theories based on experimental studies. The most notable example of such work is Ekmans neurocultural theory (1972),
initially based on one experiment (Friesen, 1972).
Eventually, the topdown strategy prevailed and the psychological approach became popular. The history is well known.

The pioneering work of Tomkins disciplesCarroll Izard, Paul

Ekman, and Wallace Friesennot only constituted the most
important and popular chapter in the study of nonverbal communication, but decisively promoted a renaissance in the study
of emotion. The new concept of facial expression helped to connect psychological causes and evolutionary functions, and to
maintain a stream of behavioral research during the paperand-pencil cognitivist era.
But such endeavor took its toll on the balance between
explanation and description. The psychological approach to
facial expression is a quintessential product of the topdown
strategy: it assumes simple, a priori conceptual categories that
look evident because they fit into researchers and the publics
commonsense assumptions, but they are actually grounded on
problematic empirical evidence. The testing of expressions of
emotion has also some technical limitations that arbitrarily
shaped researchers explanations about where, when, how,
andmost importantwhy facial behavior happens.
Paradoxically, Darwin, the champion of the bottomup strategy, was responsible for inspiring some of the a priori assumptions of the current topdown approach. Darwins The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872/1965) was a sort of
popular book in which he indulged in anecdotal stories and
retouched illustrations for the sake of persuasiveness.
Unfortunately, Darwin did not have access to some primitive
forms of motion pictures (e.g., Muybridges; see Fernndez-Dols

Author note: This article was funded by the Spanish Government (Grant PSI 2011-28720).
Corresponding author: Jos-Miguel Fernndez-Dols, Universidad Autnoma de Madrid, Facultad de Psicologa, Madrid 28049, Espaa. Email: jose.dols@uam.es

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4 Emotion Review Vol. 5 No. 1

& Ruiz-Belda, 1997) and he followed an age-old tradition in the

arts, basing his arguments on still representations of expressions,
chosen on subjective or aesthetic bases. For example, Darwins
most famous photographic plates for his 1872 book were actually drawings based on photographs of posed faces instructed
by Darwin himself (Prodger, 2009). Darwins choice of decontextualized still figures became, for more than a century, a
theoretical prescription: movement and context were banished
from the psychologists experimental study of expression.
Of course, Darwins propagandistic icons were not the only
factor that helped to institute this static view of facial expression. Up to the 1980s, recording films or primitive video tapes
required special lighting and restricted movements. Developing
films was expensive and time-consuming, and video image resolution was low. There was no widespread use of reliable methods for the description of fine facial muscular movements, and
when such methods were available, their use was extremely
time-consuming and complex, leading researchers to the analysis
of very short sequences of facial behavior.
In this way, 19th-century traditional assumptions about
expression and 20th-century technical limitations conspired to
support the a priori assumption that expressions of emotion
were brief appearances of some static muscular configurations.
Moreover, the experimental design of the emotional events
aimed at eliciting such expressions was afflicted by a similar
mix of commonsense assumptions and practical restrictions.
Most, if not all, typical antecedents of emotion (such as love
affairs for happiness, losses of loved ones for sadness, friends
betrayals for anger, traffic accidents for fear, and so on; see, e.g.,
Wallbott & Scherer, 1986) are extremely difficult or impossible
to produce in the laboratory. Thus, less typical, or indeed quite
unnatural, stimuli were expected to elicit typical emotions and
their natural expressions.
A conspicuous example of such unnatural stimuli is movies.
Researchers thought movies would provide the solution to the
challenge they faced. Movies are make-believe devices that
popular wisdom identifies as natural emotion elicitors. However,
the way in which movies cause emotions is not a solution, but
more of a research problem in itself. Movies probably constitute
the least natural set of stimuli ever produced. They are bidimensional, dynamic events that represent other events seen from
outside through a huge number of temporal and spatial conventions (e.g., the action of the represented event rarely takes place
in real time); moreover, movies apparently allow identical
reproductions of complex eventsyou can push the key play
as many times as you want, a recent feature of the perceptual
world absent throughout millions of years of evolution. The
emotions of movie audiences are filtered and interfered with by
extremely sophisticated forms of media literacy. The assumption that movie automatically elicit pure, ancestral, midbrain
basic emotions impervious to neocortical processes would seem
too nave from both the evolutionary and psychological points
of view.
Last but not least, the arbitrary assumptions about the concept
of expression and its elicitors were reinforced by some accidental factors that had transcendental but undesirable theoretical

consequences. Up until the end of the 20th century, people were

not used to being photographed or filmed by camerasa trivial
appliance today, but an awesome device not so many years ago.
Researchers feared that participants attention would be focused
on the camera, and this led to the introduction of hidden cameras.
But the concealment of cameras encouraged an additional
common sense-based but actually untested assumption: Private
expressions were necessarily true, and public expressions were
probably false. Thus, expressions of emotion were categorized
in terms of implicit two-value logic with a crisp binary decision:
true versus false.
All in all, research on the expression of emotion included
the following prescriptions and their corresponding implicit
assumptions:
Facial expressions are bidimensional stimuli (senders
and receivers position in a three-dimensional space are
irrelevant features).
Facial expressions are instantaneous, brief, static facial
configurations (muscular movement per se is not a
relevant feature).
Distinctive facial information is based on extreme positions of the muscles, muscular tension being synonymous with emotion intensity (the sequence and timing of
the unfolding of facial muscles is irrelevant).
The distinctiveness of static close-ups of facial expression is based on self-contained facial information
(contextual information, including simultaneous body
behavior, is irrelevant).
Facial expressions of basic emotion can be elicited by
any kind of artificial stimulus (the production of facial
expressions is impervious to the symbolic features of the
stimuli).
Facial expressions must be described in terms of a twovalue logic that distinguishes between true and false
expressions (the referential value of facial expressions is
not fuzzy, and does not depend on the context).
To these six assumptions can be added a seventh, following
by deduction from the last one:
Facial expressions are universal. True facial expressions of emotion would be a hard, fixed pattern of
behavior cast from the parents genes that can be isolated
in humansirrespective of their age, gender, or cultural
backgroundacross situations. The assumption that
true smiles leak any individuals happiness from cradle
to grave is one example of this assumption.

A New Look at the Study of Facial

Expression
The only potentially solid empirical grounds for this minimalist
view of facial expressions (as bidimensional, static, instantaneous, self-contained, crisp, and universal signals) would consist

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Fernndez-Dols Advances in the Study of Facial Expression 5

in showing that such signals are the smallest and briefest amount
of consistent information about the emotional state of the sender.
This hypothesis has been systematically tested through recognition studies, that is, with a focus on the receiver rather than on
the sender of the expression. As Nelson and Russell discuss in
this special section (2013; see also Russell, 1994), practically all
of these studies consisted in asking participants to verbally categorize carefully posed expressions. Ironically, these posed
expressions construed by researchersfollowing their own
commonsense assumptionshave been considered not just true
but normative, while deliberate expressions produced by participants have been considered unreliable and unworthy of any
test. A research program that sets out to test the informational
value of the senders facial expressions should be based mainly
on the senders actual expressions, rather than on the capacity of
the receiver to decode artificial stimuli. Even if such capacities
were confirmed for posed artificial expressions, these findings
would not necessarily confirm the value of expressions as natural signals of emotion. Showing that a capacity, process, or
behavior can exist in all human beings does not mean that it is
actually functional and accessible in natural circumstances. All
humans, with the proper training, can understand basic Western
arithmetic, but arithmetic is not a naturally given way of dealing
with quantity (Norenzayan & Heine, 2005). In fact, the conclusions of studies on the recognition of actual, natural expressions
(e.g., Naab & Russell, 2007) are far from confirming the aforementioned minimalist hypothesis. Reisenzein, Studtmann, and
Horstmann (2013) and Fernndez-Dols and Crivelli (2013) provide additional evidence that helps to explain such inconclusiveness: Experimental and field studies do not confirm the
existence of static, instantaneous, self-contained, crisp, and
universal expressions of basic emotion.
Fortunately, the described seven assumptions about facial
expression are starting to be empirically reconsidered:

Researchers are beginning to emphasize that looking at a

face is an active process which must take into account
the relative position of sender and receiver in a spatial
location. Atkinson and Smithsons (2013) and Rigato
and Farronis (2013) articles present two examples of
this approach that opens the way to the consideration of
gaze and relative position of the target facial expression
as key factors in facial behavior and its corresponding
neural processes.
Facial behavior urgently requires a dynamic approach,
and the development of such an approach is, fortunately,
already under way, with some promising initial work.
Krumhuber, Kappas, and Manstead (2013) review such
studies, which herald a new era in the design and selection of expressions as stimuli; this in turn raises a
number of fascinating questions about the concept of
expression itself (e.g., facial muscles do not move synchronically into a static outcome, as suggested by the
icons of facial expressions).
Subtle or isolated muscular movements may constitute an
embodiment of different cognitive and affective processes,

and taking this into account will lead to much more sophisticated views of facial expression. Scherer, Mortillaro, and
Mehu (2013; see also Scherer, Clark-Polner, & Mortillaro,
2011) discuss a conceptual and empirical approach to
more inclusive views of facial behavior and emotion. In
addition, sequence and interaction of facial behavior can
play a substantive role in natural emotional displays.
Waller and Micheletta (2013), discuss how observational
and anatomical studies can contribute to explaining the
causes and functions of natural repertoires of facial motor
behavior.
Context is receiving increasing attention in different laboratories. This special section includes a review by Hassin,
Aviezer, and Bentin (2013) focused on the contextual factors that accompany facial behavior and its interpretation.
Lindquist and Gendron (2013), for their part, summarize
ongoing research on the important role of the symbolic
context in the perception of facial behavior, and Widen
(2013) describes the essential connections between the
recognition of facial expressions and the development of
the semantic categories of emotion in children.
New research approaches are emerging on the ways in
which facial behavior is processed and elicited by the
human brain. Whalen etal. (2013) review the role of
some brain regions, such as the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, in the processing of facial stimuli. The
role of such structures seems closer to adaptive contextdependent learning than to mere encapsulated domainspecific adaptations (see also Atkinson & Smithson,
2013; Lindquist & Gendron, 2013; Rigato & Farroni,
2013). In the same vein, Fugate (2013) questions traditional approaches to the categorization of facial expressions as an outcome of predetermined, modular brain
structures.
Based on the available evidence from field studies,
Fernndez-Dols and Crivelli (2013) propose an alternative view of facial expression as adaptive behaviors with
flexible, context-dependent referential values.
Finally, the concept of universality and its limitations are
discussed by Elfenbein (2013) in the framework of a linguistic metaphor that emphasizes the existence of
expressive dialects, and by Nelson and Russell (2013),
who discuss the claims of universality of expressions
based on classic recognition studies.

Balancing TopDown and BottomUp

Strategies
Of course, the authors mentioned in the previous paragraph
do not necessarily share the criticisms expressed here, nor
are they involved in a unitary program; but their contributions are certainly paving the way for a new approach to
facial behaviorone more likely to strike an appropriate balance between topdown and bottomup views on the study
of facial expression.

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6 Emotion Review Vol. 5 No. 1

Rather than being the consequence of an explicit return to

observational, accumulative records, the appearance of new balanced approaches to the study of facial expression is, on the
bottomup side, the consequence of some important changes in
everyday assumptions and technical resources. New technical
resources are helping researchers to break with assumptions
based on resources from the past.
The spread of new forms of computer-based icons has consequences in the approach to expressions. Static 19th- and 20thcentury icons are substituted by video clips or virtual avatars
that include movement in their representations. While Darwins
book (1872/1965) on facial expression was pioneering in the
use of scientific photography, some of the work reported in this
special section is equally pioneering in its incorporation of
dynamic icons as standards for the description of facial expression (see Krumhuber etal., 2013; Scherer etal., 2013).
Furthermore, the omnipresence of cameras and computers in
everyday life increasingly provides researchers with opportunities to design experimental or field studies in which the presence of cameras or computers is part of the senders daily life
and can unobtrusively record natural events (see FernndezDols & Crivelli, 2013; Reisenzein etal., 2013). Finally, the progressive development of software capable of simulating facial
movement in great detail and of automatically coding facial
movements should offer researchers a less restrictive view of
the empirical and conceptual boundaries of the technical concept of facial expression. In summary, new technical devices
have made researchers more aware of important sources of
variation in natural emotion episodes, while enabling them to
circumvent the costly traditional observational methods.
The consequences of this new technical landscape are
starting to become visible thanks to the parallel development
of alternative theoretical approaches to the study of emotion.
The basic-emotion approach practically monopolized the
study of facial expression during the 20th century. In the early
years of the new century, other theories are approaching facial
expression in a progressively bolder way. Appraisal theorists
have overcome the customary theoretical contradiction which
assumed that emotions were unlimited combinations of contextdependent affective and cognitive processes, but with a limited number of expressions. The outcome of this conceptual
shift has been the emergence of analytic approaches that break
facial behavior down into components related to specific
appraisals or the action tendencies associated with such
appraisals (Frijda & Tcherkassof, 1997; Scherer & Ellgring,
2007; Smith & Scott, 1997).
Other theories have incorporated the concept of emotion into
a much broader and more complex process, whereby core affect
triggers a series of processes and behaviors in which emotion
is just an epiphenomenon (Russell, 2003), and expression of
emotion is one of the several potential behavioral strategies
included in an indeterminate number of more or less typical
emotional episodes.
This combination of greater descriptive finesse and theories
that emphasize the counterintuitive complexities of the causes
and functions of emotion can help restore a balance between the

topdown and bottomup strategies. The principal lesson of this

new look would be, in my view, that expression of emotion
is a commonsense term that conceals the scientific challenge
posed by a continuous flow of muscular movements from bodies moving in a three-dimensional world which produces events
with flexible and context-dependent meanings.
The study of facial expressions should give way to the
study of the facial muscular movements related, for example, to
core affect, unexplained emotion, affect regulation, appraisals,
action tendencies, or motives around an emotional episode. It is
time to study plural, and potentially parallel, systems of facial
behavior linked to different processes. Such systems are embedded in concrete situations, and not in abstract, monolithic,
immutable entities called basic emotions.
Two contemporaries of Darwin, Edwin Abbott and Lewis
Carroll, published popular books, namely, Flatland: A Romance
of Many Dimensions (1884/2010) and Alices Adventures in
Wonderland (1865/2008) respectively. Flatland is a world in
two dimensions in which the idea of a third dimension is forbidden. In Wonderland, heads appear without their bodies and grins
exist without their heads. For more than a century after The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872/1965),
facial stimuli used for studying the perception of expression
were from a Flatland populated by disembodied, immobile,
two-dimensional beings, while experiments on the production
of expressions occurred in a sort of Wonderland where researchers studied the Cheshire cats grin without the Cheshire cat,
looking at facial behavior removed from the natural context in
which it is performed. Maybe it is time to leave those worlds.

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