The emotion read from a face is changed by the body and situation it appears with, so that the same expression can look angry, disgusted or joyful.
In 2008 Aviezer and colleagues placed photographs of disgusted faces on bodies holding a soiled object or raising a fist; viewers saw disgust in one case and anger in the other. A 2012 study in Science by Aviezer, Yaacov Trope and Alexander Todorov found that viewers could not tell from faces alone whether professional tennis players had just won or lost a point, but could from their bodies.
In practice
- A photograph of a footballer's contorted face is captioned as anguish, and later shown to be the moment he scored.
- A hiring panel reads a candidate's tense expression as hostility because his arms are folded.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is that faces, especially at high intensity, carry less information than people assume, and observers resolve the ambiguity from bodily posture and situation without noticing that they have done so.
- In its favour
- The findings have been replicated and extended, and they fit a wider body of work, associated with Lisa Feldman Barrett and others, showing that context shapes emotion perception more than classic accounts of universal facial expressions allowed.
- Against it
- Researchers in the tradition of Paul Ekman reply that faces still carry substantial information in ordinary, less intense expressions, and that laboratory composites of faces and bodies are artificial. How far context dominates remains disputed.
- Standing
- The laboratory descendant of the Kuleshov Effect. Compare the Halo Effect and the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind