Premium
The recognition of pure and blended facial expressions of emotion from still photographs
Author(s) -
NUMMENMAA TAPIO
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1988.tb00773.x
Subject(s) - psychology , surprise , sorrow , repertoire , task (project management) , cognitive psychology , facial expression , meaning (existential) , nonverbal communication , social psychology , pleasure , notation , communication , linguistics , physics , management , neuroscience , acoustics , economics , psychotherapist , philosophy
The article considers volitional facial expressions as emotional messages. The following two questions were posed: Is it possible for an actor to express pleasure, surprise, hate, fear, and sorrow, and pairwise combinations of these, plus additionally love, making 16 different shades of meaning altogether? Can these pure and blended expressions be recognized from still photographs? The repertoire of one actor was studied. The judgemental study of recognition was based on a multimethod approach, which included both judgements of the expressions using verbal labels and non‐verbal judgements planned to reveal the cluster structure of the stimuli. Five experiments are reported. In the main the actor succeeds in the task, though there are some systematic limitations in his repertoire. The results depend systematically on the way the task has been structured. Still photographs are seen as useful for specific purposes.