Content area
Full Text
J Nonverbal Behav (2011) 35:1733
DOI 10.1007/s10919-010-0098-6
ORIGINAL PAPER
Ulf Dimberg Sven Sderkvist
Published online: 10 October 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract According to the facial feedback hypothesis, facial muscles do not only express emotions, they also have the ability to modulate subjective experiences of emotions and to initiate emotions. This study examined the voluntary facial action technique, where participants were instructed to react with the Zygomatic major muscle (smile) or the Corrugator supercilii muscle (frown) when exposed to different stimuli. The results demonstrate that the technique effectively induces facial feedback effects. Through use of this technique we further addressed three important areas of facial feedback and found, rst, that facial feedback did not modulate the experience of positive and negative emotion evoking stimuli differently. Second, the modulating ability provided signicant feedback effects, while the initiating ability did not. Third, an effect of feedback remained and could be detected even some time after the critical manipulation. It is concluded that the present technique can be used in the future study of facial feedback.
Keywords Facial feedback Facial expressions Emotion
Introduction
Over a hundred years since the idea rst originated in works by Darwin (1872) and James (1884) the two-way relationship between face and emotion is today established as the facial feedback hypothesis. Darwin proposed that the experience of an emotion was affected by the emotional behaviour, that a free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensied it and contrary that the repression of outward signs softened an emotion (Darwin 1872). James argued that bodily changes directly follow the perception of the exciting stimulus, and that our sensation of these bodily changes is the emotion. He maintained in a well-known example that we do not ee from a bear because we feel fear, but instead we feel fear because we are eeing (James 1884).
U. Dimberg (&) S. Sderkvist
Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Box 1225, SE-751 42 Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]
The Voluntary Facial Action Technique: A Method to Test the Facial Feedback Hypothesis
123
18 J Nonverbal Behav (2011) 35:1733
Almost a century later Tomkins (1962) and Ekman (1973) continued to focus on the relationship between bodily expression and the experience of emotion. Ekman demonstrated new evidence for the idea of...