title: Beyond pleasure and pain: Facial expression ambiguity in adults and children during intense situations.
abstract: According to psychological models as well as common intuition, intense positive and negative situations evoke highly distinct emotional expressions. Nevertheless, recent work has shown that when judging isolated faces, the affective valence of winning and losing professional tennis players is hard to differentiate. However, expressions produced by professional athletes during publicly broadcasted sports events may be strategically controlled. To shed light on this matter we examined if ordinary people's spontaneous facial expressions evoked during highly intense situations are diagnostic for the situational valence. In Experiment 1 we compared reactions with highly intense positive situations (surprise soldier reunions) versus highly intense negative situations (terror attacks). In Experiment 2, we turned to children and compared facial reactions with highly positive situations (e.g., a child receiving a surprise trip to Disneyland) versus highly negative situations (e.g., a child discovering her parents ate up all her Halloween candy). The results demonstrate that facial expressions of both adults and children are often not diagnostic for the valence of the situation. These findings demonstrate the ambiguity of extreme facial expressions and highlight the importance of context in everyday emotion perception. (PsycINFO Database Record
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Goethe-University of Frankfurt.
authors.forename: Sofia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wenzler
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Muhlenberg College.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-6608-3054
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Levine
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Goethe-University of Frankfurt.
authors.forename: Rolf
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: van Dick
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Goethe-University of Frankfurt.
authors.forename: Viola
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Oertel-Knöchel
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
authors.forename: Hillel
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Aviezer
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D055815:Young Adult