GEMEP Corpus

Facial expression of emotion

Mortillaro, M., Mehu, M., & Scherer, K. R. (2011). Subtly different positive emotions can be distinguished by their facial expressions. Social Psychological & Personality Science, 2(3), 262-271.

 

ABSTRACT

Positive emotions are crucial to social relationships and social interaction. Although smiling is a frequently studied facial action, investigations of positive emotional expressions are underrepresented in the literature. This may be partly because of the assumption that all positive emotions share the smile as a common signal but lack specific facial configurations. The present study investigated prototypical expressions of four positive emotions-interest, pride, pleasure, and joy. The Facial Action Coding System was used to microcode facial expression of representative samples of these emotions taken from the Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayal corpus. The data showed that the frequency and duration of several action units differed between emotions, indicating that actors did not use the same pattern of expression to encode them. The authors argue that an appraisal perspective is suitable to describe how subtly differentiated positive emotional states differ in their prototypical facial expressions.

 

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

From this web page you can download supplemental material for this publication.

The appraisal profiles used in the analyses have been derived from the results of a recent study on the meaning of 24 emotion words in four different languages: the GRID project (Fontaine et al., 2007). The document describing the procedure and the results can be downloaded by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page: Mortillaro at al SPPS 2011 - Supp. Material - Appraisal Profiles.pdf

The table reporting Means and Standard Deviations for Apex Rate and Duration of all coded Action Units in the four emotions. The table can be downloaded by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page: Mortillaro at al SPPS 2011 - Supp. Material - AU descriptives.pdf