Studies of emotional reactions. I. 'A preliminary study of facial expression."

Abstract

Instead of photographing persons in the of voluntarily expressing a certain emotion the writer took pictures of students who were given a series of unexpected stimuli to emotion and were instructed merely to act natural. Music, pictures, odors, frogs, and electric shocks were used as stimuli. On the basis of the resulting photographs it was possible to make analyses of disgust, repulsion, anxiety, and pain. It was found in a check series for which several subjects were asked to reproduce voluntarily the expressions which they had already made involuntarily, that these forced expressions were more like those which have come to be thought of as typical of the various emotions than were the expressions of the first or natural series. Besides being often at variance with the accepted traditions these latter showed great differences among themselves. In some cases where it was expected, no expression of emotion was present at all. From Psych Bulletin 22:12:00835. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)