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Recognition of Facial Expressions of Emotion is Related to their Frequency in Everyday Life

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Abstract

Cross-cultural and laboratory research indicates that some facial expressions of emotion are recognized more accurately and faster than others. We assessed the hypothesis that such differences depend on the frequency with which each expression occurs in social encounters. Thirty observers recorded how often they saw different facial expressions during natural conditions in their daily life. For a total of 90 days (3 days per observer), 2,462 samples of seen expressions were collected. Among the basic expressions, happy faces were observed most frequently (31 %), followed by surprised (11.3 %), sad (9.3 %), angry (8.7 %), disgusted (7.2 %), and fearful faces, which were the least frequent (3.4 %). A significant amount (29 %) of non-basic emotional expressions (e.g., pride or shame) were also observed. We correlated our frequency data with recognition accuracy and response latency data from prior studies. In support of the hypothesis, significant correlations (generally, above .70) emerged, with recognition accuracy increasing and latency decreasing as a function of frequency. We conclude that the efficiency of facial emotion recognition is modulated by familiarity of the expressions.

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Notes

  1. In fact, dynamic expressions are recognized more easily and accurately than static expressions (Recio et al. 2013), and expressive facial movement benefits multiple aspects of emotion recognition (Krumhuber et al. 2013), at least in laboratory conditions. Also, the emotions in facial expressions are made meaningful in context (Hassin et al. 2013), which would attune perceivers to distinctions between expressions (Parkinson 2013). Nevertheless, the empathic accuracy literature (see Flury and Ickes 2001; Rollings et al. 2011) suggests that natural or spontaneous expressions in real-life situations or in vivo tasks (even though dynamic and contextualized) might be more difficult to recognize than static and isolated prototypical expressions.

  2. Often, observers had to interact with the expresser. In such cases, the recording had to be made off-line, i.e., delayed until the end of the interaction. It is possible that, in those conditions, the recording accuracy suffered, due to reliance on memory. We do not know whether the off-line recording affected all the expressions similarly. No observer, however, mentioned this type of difficulty in the interview with the researchers at the end of the observation period. In addition, a strict dichotomy between interactive and non-interactive contexts, and the corresponding comparisons to address this issue, could not be made because of the great variability of situations.

  3. To disentangle these two possibilities (i.e., that either the actual occurrence or rather the perceived noticeability can account for the observed frequencies), an experimental approach should manipulate the objective frequency of expressions while keeping the recognition demands constant; or, alternatively, the easiness of recognition should be varied while keeping the frequency constant. However, although this approach could possibly be implemented under laboratory conditions, it would denaturize the real experience people gather from their normal social life.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant PSI2009-07245 from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, and the Agencia Canaria de Investigación, Innovación y Sociedad de la Información (Neurocog Project), and the European Regional Development Funds.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive Psychology, University of La Laguna, 38205, Tenerife, Spain

    Manuel G. Calvo, Aida Gutiérrez-García & Andrés Fernández-Martín

  2. School of Science, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

    Lauri Nummenmaa

  3. Turku PET Centre, Turku, Finland

    Lauri Nummenmaa

Authors
  1. Manuel G. Calvo
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  2. Aida Gutiérrez-García
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  3. Andrés Fernández-Martín
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Correspondence to Manuel G. Calvo.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 5.

Table 5 Mean recognition accuracy and latency of correct responses (RTs) in cross-cultural (see Nelson and Russell 2013) and prior laboratory studies (Calder et al. 2000; Calvo and Lundqvist 2008; Calvo and Nummenmaa 2009; Elfenbein and Ambady 2003; Palermo and Coltheart 2004)
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Calvo, M.G., Gutiérrez-García, A., Fernández-Martín, A. et al. Recognition of Facial Expressions of Emotion is Related to their Frequency in Everyday Life. J Nonverbal Behav 38, 549–567 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0191-3

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