Communication Flashcards
Communication has evolved
55% Body language
38% Tone, speed and inflection of our voice
7% What we are actually saying
Two main claims that communication of emotions have evolved
o Encoding hypothesis: When we feel a state it is encoded in a unique universal pattern.
o Decoding hypothesis: Across cultures we have evolved to be able to quickly judge other people’s emotions
• Co-evolution: our signalling capacity co-evolved with the capacity of others to interpret and decode those signals – If you express a emotion that no one understands, there is not point for it
• Social/emotion intelligence – Reading other peoples emotions effectively
Paul Eckman and Wallace Friesen
Non-verbal behaviour was organized into 5 categories
Emblems: Non verbal gestures that communicate words in a specific culture: about 800 emblems in different cultures, a good deal of cultural variability
o Have a direct verbal translation
o Are known by almost everybody in a social group
o Shall have a particular effect on the recipient
Illustrators: Gestures used to dramatize and to give visual imagery to our speech. This even occurs when talking on the phone, when the recipient can’t see us – It’s no ingrained in us
Regulators: Gestures used to control conversation. Coordinate who speaks and who listens. Eye contact
Self adaptors or manipulators: Random behaviours that we emit, touch our hair, move legs, scratch. Nervous outcomes that have no direct communicative value. The more stressed we are we do them, also when lying. Adaptors are gestures that were at one point used for personal convenience but have turned into a habit (adjusting glasses in a tense situation). Adaptors are linked with negative feelings (anxiety-increases self touch)
Affect displays: Hug
Facial expressions of emotions
Eckman 1965.
Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined, but universal across human cultures and thus biological in origin.
Universal expressions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise.
What sets apart the facial expression of emotion from other facial expressions.
o 1- Symmetry
o 2- Short duration: 1-5 seconds
o 3- Involves reliable muscle movements.
Every emotion gave a muscle movement that we can’t fake
Ekman’s initial study
3000 pictures of facial expressions
He took the pictures to other countries (Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Chile),
Presented the pictures with the 6 words for the emotions and asked with word matched the emotion displayed in the picture,
They generally matched 80-90%
Issues
Forced choice – Gave the emotions and asked to pair
Gradient critique: All the expressions should be recognised the same across cultures and they are not, some are well recognised like happiness and others less like fear and surprise.
Ecological validity: Can you see those faces in the real world, the pictures are extreme, done by actors. People are better at recognising dynamic displays because they elicit higher emotional arousal - Pictures, a film would have been better
Fore tribe: Stone age conditions, cannibalism, short life expectancy.
No written language: He constructed emotion specific stories. Showed them three faces, one of them matches the story. They chose the right one 80-90%, even children.
He also took pictures of the people’s faces when listening to the stories and showed the pictures to college students accuracy rates with 60-70% except from fear and surprise.
Oberman 2007
People spontaneously mimic emotional facial expressions in order to facilitate their understanding. When you block facial mimicry by holding a pencil in your mouth, you also block recognition. Mimicry is needed for correct identification of emotions.
Dimberg, Thunberg and Elmehed, 2000
This can happen unconsciously. Unconscious exposure to happy and angry faces results in distinct facial muscle reactions that corresponded to the happy and angry stimulus faces. Both positive and negative emotional reactions can be unconsciously evoked. Draws attention to the fact that aspects of emotional face-to-face communication can occur on an unconscious level.
New additions to universal facial expressions of emotions:
o Contempt: Asymmetrical tightening of the lips corners or sneer (Disregard, I don’t care)
o Exhilaration: Laughter involves the contraction of the muscles surrounding the eyes also appears to be a signal of a distinct emotion. (Super happy)
Guilt, jealousy and gratitude are difficult to identify from a picture. Jealousy you need the context. Not universal.
Emotional expressions one needs to show that:
The experience of the specific emotion correlates with a unique pattern of facial actions (encoding evidence)
Others perceive that display as a sign of the target emotion preferably in different cultures (decoding evidence)
Other species show similar expressive behaviours in contexts that resemble those of common interest.
Embarrassment
The antecedents of embarrassment most typically involve violations of social conventions that increase social exposure.
Task of making particular faces in front of people resembles a common elicitor of embarrassment (loss of physical poise and composure in front of others)
Coded the behaviour 10 seconds after they were told to rest:
Frame by frame analysis showed that
o 1- eyes went down
o 2- turned head to side
o 3- Smiled for 2 sects as the head movement happened – smile of embarrassment is different then that of amusement
o 4 - At the onset and offset of smile there were other movements around the mouth such as lip sucks, lip presses, lip puckers
Encoding evidence: Unfolded in a coordinated and reliable way, for 5 secs. Fluid gradual onset and offset
Decoding evidence: If showed 2-3 s video clip others can identify it
About 50% universal
People can differentiate embarrassment from shame which is gaze aversion and downward head movements
• Shame follows the failure to live up to expectations, either one’s own or those of significant others
• Guilt appears to follow transgressions of moral rules that govern behaviour toward others.
What is the evolutionary advantage of expressing our emotions?
Informative: Emotional experience and expression are sources of information about the social world. They indicate the sender’s emotions, intentions and relationship with the target. Whites in human eyes shows others where you are looking, if you look scared and are looking somewhere, others will immediately look there to see a threat.
Evocative: They elicit complementary emotion: Faces of anger enhance fear conditioning in observers even when the photographs are not consciously observed (Ohman and Dimberg 1978, Esteves, Dimberg and Ohman 1994). Expressions of distress evoke compassion in observers.
Incentive: Displays invite desired social behaviours. Displays of positive emotions are displayed by parents to reward behaviour in children thus increasing the probability of those behaviour in the future. Laughter from interaction partners also rewards desirable social behaviour in adults. If you look angry you are saying don’t do it again.
Sex differences?
The ability to identify emotional expressions of others shows sexual dimorphism: On average, women outperform men.
Accumulating evidence suggests an underlying role for testosterone
A single administration of testosterone has been demonstrated to reduce emotion recognition abilities in young women
After testosterone administration women show impaired performance on the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ Test
The effect of testosterone on the RMET varied with a proxy of foetal testosterone to the2D:4D ratio. Low ration = Longer ring finger compared to second finger. In utero testosterone exposure lowers the ratio
A lower 2D:4D ratio predicts greater impairment on the RMET after testosterone administration
Thus, by altering connectivity of the prefrontal cortex with other brain regions, testosterone can be regarded a modulator of the network involved in emotion recognition
Cultural variation of facial expression of emotion
Briggs (1970) found that Inuit (Eskimos) do not express anger – Strange because anger is universal
17th century Samurai wives were alleged to smile upon receipt of news that their husbands died nobly in battle.
Members of different cultures vary in their emotional expression in several ways:
Ritualised displays: stylised ways of displaying a particular emotion. For example: anger involves furrowed brow, glare, lip tighten and lip press as prototypical actions, cultures/situations might take the elements and elaborate upon it: exaggerate, dramatize it.
Regulation of expressive behaviour.
Matsumoto et al, 1997
American college students and Japanese college students watched a really disgusting film in two conditions, first in private and low light, then with an authority figure in high light.
♣ In private, both students showed, universality in facial expression, exact muscle movement to the exact millisecond – Look the same
♣ In public, with the authority figure in US the college student showed more intense expression, Japanese student there was a masking of the disgust expression to a politer one.
Matsumoto et al, 2009
Studied thousands of photographs taken at the Athens Olympics in 2004 just after matches had ended.
Interested in whether, and how quickly, competitors’ altered their initial facial emotional expressions after winning or losing.
Key findings:
• There are cultural differences.
• Athletes’ initial emotional expressions were universal; however, their subsequent expressions were culturally regulated.
Collectivist cultures, such as China, tend to mask their emotional expressions more than athletes from individualistic cultures like the UK.
Ttended to kick in within one to two seconds of the initial appearance of a facial emotional display.
The initial facial reaction is triggered automatically by subcortical brain structures; before more culturally specific modification is applied by the motor cortex.
Jack et al, 2009
Western Caucasian and East Asian looked White and Chinese faces to categorise them into the six core emotional expressions.
East Asian participants made significantly more errors when categorising disgust and fear compared with the Western participants - they focus on the top of the face – eyes, they look similar in these emotions. As westerns we look at the whole face
Certain emotions are expressed slightly differently in East Asia – Much more variation in the top half of the face. They have learned to focus on different facial regions.
Communication of emotions: Smile
Universal
o Smiling is primarily an individual act. We smile as a result of an inner feeling of happiness
o Smiling is primarily a social act. We smile to let those around us know that we are happy.
In attempting to answer the why we smile question, Robert Kraut and Robert Johnston from Cornell University decided to go bowling!
o 4% of bowlers smiled after hitting a strike
o 42% smiled when they turned round Communicative
Senft et al, 2016
When strangers meet, theyjump to a lot of conclusions about each otherextremely quick.
For instance, being a womanmeans you’re more likely to be perceived as warm,but less likely to be seen as dominant.
Students who ratedneutral faces, some of the usual effects of gender and ethnic stereotypes came into play. -rated Caucasian men lower on agreeableness than Caucasian women.
However,
♣ Personality ratings disappeared or were greatly reduced when those faces were smiling.
♣ “Smiling provides cues related to personality that are strong enough to negate the use of information based on gender or race in forming impressions of others,” - “smiling levels the playing field”.
Vocal expressions of emotions
Humans rely extensively on the voice
Van Bezooijen, van Otto, and Heenan
4 male and 4 female Dutch native actors saying (“Two months pregnant”) in neutral voice and voices expressing nine emotions: Disgust, surprise, shame, interest, joy, fear, contempt, sadness and anger.
Audio recording were played to Dutch, Taiwanese and Japanese subjects. They were able to identify Dutch vocal expressions of emotion beyond chance expectancy – They couldn’t understand the verbal content, but could understand the emotional expression
Juslin and Laukka (2003
In a review of 60 studies of this kind, concluded than hearers can judge 5 different emotions in the voice: anger, fear, happiness, sadness and tenderness with accuracy rates that approach 70%.
Judgements are better when listeners listen to members of their own culture. Some emotions like disgust are not well communicated by voice
Laughter
Laughter is clearly an emotional signal.
Very frequent
Probably preceded language in its evolutionary emergence.
It was and it is a primary means for enabling closeness with others.
Sometimes laughs do not involve emotions at all and are used to fill empty gaps in conversations, a signal that they are paying attention and encourage the speaker to carry on.
People attracted to each other laugh more.
Szameitat, D. et al 2010.
Animal laughter is a reflex-like reaction restricted to the behavioural contexts of play and tickling
Human laughter is a more complex behaviour, expressed not only in the context of play, but also in various emotional states.
Bryant et al 2016
Asked pairs of undergraduates (some were friends and some only met that day) to come into the lab and talk about various topics. Recorded
Could tell who were friends and who wern’t - The listeners’ ability to judge which pairs were friends and which were strangers was very similar across cultures, including those with no familiarity with English.
It doesn’t matter where you come from: it seems laughter is a language we all understand.
In one illustrative study, participants read descriptions of 22 different emotions, and then produced vocal bursts: sighs, growls, grunts, and laughs to convey each emotion (Simon-Thomas et al., 2009). Naive observers could reliably identify several understudied emotional states,..
Communication of emotions by touch
Tactile communication: touch is exquisitely sensitive; a lot of the brain is devoted to analysing touch sensation.
Touch is the most developed sensory modality at birth and contributes to cognitive and socio-emotional development throughout infancy and childhood
We touch other people To reinforce reciprocity. To sooth – Release stress Safety - parents who have a lot of bodily contact with their children tend to have children who are more secure and feel safer in social environments. - Radical differences in cultures: hunter and gatherers 1st year of life children are always held by someone. For pleasure
Hertenstein, Keltner and Apps (2005)
Encoder (toucher) and decoder (touchee) separated by an opaque black curtain.
The encoder was given a list of emotions and asked to make contact with the decoder on the arm to communicate each emotion, using any form of touch.
For anger, disgust and fear, love, gratitude and sympathy (able to transmit these emotions 50-60%).
Spain better than in USA at identifying and conveying emotions through touch
Women try to communicate anger to men - they didn’t get it.
Men tried to communicate sympathy to woman - no chance!
Romantic couples tend to perform better
In other research, people prove to be better able to communicate emotion through touch when allowed to touch other regions of the body than the arm (Herten- stein et al., 2009), and there is cross-cultural similarity in which emotions can be conveyed in tactile contact (see Hertenstein et al., 2009).
Communication of emotions through art
How is that you can read a poem, listen to music see art and trigger powerful emotions?
Freudian view: Art allows us to express emotions instead of attacking each other.
Clarifies our emotions:
5-25 % of our daily emotions are not clear to us. They require the use of art to express themselves.
Relieves powerful feelings:
Powerful feelings drive us to artistic expression: studied the lives of creative people, they report that emotion conflict and stress are catalyst for art. - through artistic expression we gain catharsis.
Do you think that all cultures recognise the same emotions in music?
Fritz et al 2009
Played samples of computer-generated piano music to members of the culturally isolated Mafa tribe of Cameroon as well as to Western participants.
The music had been specifically designed to convey either happiness, sadness or fear by careful manipulation of tempo, pitch and tone according to Western conventions.
The tribes-people had never before heard Western music and yet they matched the musical samples to the appropriate (according to Western convention) pictures of facial emotional expressions, with an accuracy significantly above chance performance.
Both them and Western participants relied on the same cues to make their judgements:
Pieces with higher tempo were more likely to be rated as happy, whereas lower tempo prompted ratings of fear.
Hejmadi, Davidson, & Rozin, 2000
One recent study ascertained whether Western observers could reliably identify the emotion conveyed in traditional Hindu dance. Presented participants in India and the United States with videotapes of renditions of anger, disgust, fear, heroism, humor, love, peace, sadness, embarrassment/shyness/modesty, and wonder. Based on video clips only lasting between 4 and 10 seconds, observers achieved accuracy rates between 61 and 69% in judging the 10 emotions communicated through dance and gesture.
