Facial Feedback and the Experience of Emotion

Abstract: Emotional facial expressions are not only considered by most scholars to communicate and express emotional states, but are also thought to affect the person expressing them. Facial feedback occurs when activity in emotion-relevant facial muscles feeds back into the brain and initiates the corresponding emotion or modulates the intensity of an ongoing emotional state. The present thesis examined the voluntary facial action technique, a method to test facial feedback, and by help of the method investigated how facial feedback influences the experience of emotion. In Study I, it was demonstrated that the voluntary facial action technique is well-suited to induce and detect facial feedback effects, and also that feedback more easily modulates the intensity of present emotions than initiates new emotions. In Study II, feedback effects were shown to primarily occur during the critical facial actions, and to almost exclusively be a result of incongruent facial actions that attenuated ongoing emotional states, while congruent facial actions had no enhancing feedback effects at all. In Study III, feedback effects were generally unaffected by the anesthetization of participants’ facial skin, indicating that feedback from the skin is not important for the feedback effect, and the results of Study II were replicated when feedback effects primarily attenuated ongoing emotional states. In summary, the present results demonstrate that emotion-relevant facial actions influence the experience of emotion via facial feedback, and that this influence is likely to be greater when the feedback is incongruent with, and can attenuate, an ongoing emotional state.