The Facial-Feedback Hypothesis
Keyaira Peavy
Liberty University
The Facial-Feedback Hypothesis is basically stating how doing certain things like smiling could
make you actually happy. Though we don’t have an emotional part in my brain, we have certain
connections that make our emotions happen (Nevid 2015). Certain actions that take place could
also be the cause of which emotion we feel. I did the experiment, but I had to make
adjustments. Instead of a pencil I used cookies, and I used the same five people. Everyone
except one person happiness was high than five both experiments. One person was at a five
when doing the teeth part, but after the no teeth part they skyrocketed to a seven. The rest
started out with one number and stayed that way after the second experiment. I don’t think
that my experiments were consistent with the hypothesis.
Emotions are a basic part of the human experience, and expressing those emotions
appropriately can be a part of improving one’s mental health. We can show our emotions in
many ways, but one of the quickest and most common ways is through facial expressions. Facial
expressions can do more than show others how we feel. Scientists have proposed the facial
feedback hypothesis, which suggests that changing our facial expressions can also change our
emotions.
Definition of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis
The facial feedback hypothesis states that our facial expressions affect our emotions. If the
facial-feedback hypothesis is correct, then not only do we smile when we feel happy, but
smiling can make us feel happy, too. According to this hypothesis, in these cases, it is the act of
smiling that produces a happy feeling. The same might hold true for other emotions as well.
Background Of The Hypothesis
Scientists have been interested in the idea of a facial-feedback hypothesis since the 1800s. In
the 1840s, William James presented the idea that awareness of your bodily experiences is the
basis of emotion. Thus, if you know that certain facial expressions are the ones you associate
with being sad, you may experience the feeling of sadness.
Darwin investigated the way animals used facial expressions and suggested the idea of facial
feedback in the 1870s. Through the latter half of the 1900s, the topic of facial feedback became
popular again. Since then, many different studies have been done to test this hypothesis.
Types Of Facial Expressions
What types of facial expressions can produce the emotions we feel? The scientific community is
still debating how the facial feedback hypothesis might work with different expressions. One
thing that seems certain plausible, though, is that a smile is connected to the production of a
happy emotion, while a frown is connected to a feeling of sadness.
Basic Emotions
It is widely accepted and understood that humans have six basic emotions:
Happiness
Surprise
Disgust
Sadness
Anger
Fear
Degrees Of Emotions
Along with the type of emotion we feel, we can also show the degree of that emotion through
our facial expressions. For example, you may be slightly angry and express that emotion with a
slight frown and furrowed eyebrows. If you're furious, though, your expressions will likely be
much more distinctive.
Complex Emotions
Often, we may feel combinations of emotions. Emotions aren't always pure or easily defined.
Some common complex emotions are joyful love, prideful anger, and ambivalence. Complex
emotions can be expressed with subtle variations of the usual facial expressions.
Duchenne vs. Non-Duchenne Smiles
A Duchenne smile is a genuine smile, while a non-Duchenne smile is a fake smile. Although
these two types of smiles are differentiated by whether the smile expresses an honest emotion
you're feeling, you can make either expression whether you're already feeling happy or not.
In the non-Duchenne smile, you simply raise the corners of your mouth. It's what you might do
when someone is going to take a photograph of you. They say, “Say cheese,” and you comply
with a non-Duchenne smile.
The Duchenne smile starts with that same facial contraction, but it also involves raising your
cheeks and squeezing your eyes. Your involuntary muscles do the extra work. So, how can you
produce a Duchenne smile if you can't actively control those muscles? If we know what a
Duchenne smile looks like, most of us can produce the same expression.
In a 2019 study, scientists carried out two experiments around Duchenne and non-Duchenne
smiling. One evaluated how ostracism influenced the expression of emotion in a social
environment, while the second replicated the results of the first experiment but focused
particularly on smiling and self-reported emotion. In the first experiment, the participants who
had higher frequencies of Duchenne smiling even during exclusion from the conversation self-
reported higher rates of happiness. In the second, the relationship between non-Duchenne
smiling and self-reported happiness was negative. However, certain participants were able to
regulate their own emotional experience even while being ostracized, which led to an
unexpected up-regulation of positive emotions.
Individual and Cultural Differences
Although all humans have many of the same basic facial expressions, some expressions may be
unique to a specific individual or culture. So, if you know the person or culture well, it may be
easier to understand what someone is expressing through facial expressions.
How the Facial Muscles Express Emotions
We often express emotions in our bodies, especially by using our facial muscles in specific ways.
Why do we do it? How do we know how to hold our faces to show our emotions? The answers
are both biological and cultural.
Facial Expressions Are Hardwired In the Brain
Scientists believe that our brains are hardwired to use the facial muscles in specific ways to
show our emotions. They suggest that this developed because people needed to live in groups
to survive. This neurological phenomenon happens not only in people who can see and imitate
the expressions of others but also in people who were born blind.
Facial Expressions Are both Instinctual And Learned
Our expressions are instinctual, but we can also learn them from others. Did you ever notice a
child's smile that looked identical to a parent's smile? That can happen not only between
biological parents and children but also between parents and their adopted children. It's
because they tend to imitate their parents’ expressions.
Along with imitating our relatives, we tend to watch others in our culture to learn how to
express our emotions. We may meet others in person, watch them on a television show or
YouTube video, or see their expression in a photo. When we do, we instinctually understand
what they're expressing, and we can learn to express that emotion in the same way.
The facial feedback hypothesis is based on the idea that a facial expression not only expresses
an emotion, but also that expression and experience are linked in that afferent sensory
feedback from the facial action influences the emotional experience. Elevating your cheeks can
make you happier, just as furrowing your brow can make you angrier. The idea was introduced
by Darwin (1872) when he noted that the experience of an emotion seemed to be intensified
when the emotion was freely expressed, but softened when repressed. James (1884) also
presented ideas along the same lines, but it took almost a century before the specific facial
feedback hypothesis was formulated by Tomkins (1962), Gellhorn (1964), Izard (1971), Ekman
(1973) and Buck (1980). Recently, Niedenthal (2007) and (Niedenthal et al. 2009, 2010)
provided the theoretical framework of embodied emotion to explain, among other things,
afferent feedback from facial actions. Empirical research has found that facial feedback has the
ability to both modulate present emotions and to initiate emotions (for reviews see Adelmann
and Zajonc 1989; Buck 1980; McIntosh 1996). This has been firmly established for happiness
and anger and the corresponding facial expressions (e.g., Dimberg and Söderkvist 2011; Laird
1974; Rutledge and Hupka 1985). Also, feedback mechanisms seem involved in the expression
of fear and sadness (e.g., Flack et al. 1999), as well as for surprise and disgust (e.g., Lewis 2012).
Recent facial feedback research has sought to improve knowledge of basic mechanisms of facial
feedback, and attempted to demonstrate clinical benefits from manipulating the facial muscles.
One insight to the basic mechanisms has been provided by Hennenlotter et al. (2009), who
demonstrated that facial feedback modulates neural activity in the amygdala. Using fMRI they
found that amygdala activation was attenuated during imitation of angry facial expressions in
participants with Botox-induced paralysis of their corrugator muscles, the muscles used when
frowning. Kim et al. (2014) further demonstrated that facial feedback modulates activity in the
amygdala in an fMRI study where participants were passively exposed to happy and angry facial
expressions. Amygdala activity was attenuated when corrugator muscles were paralyzed by
Botox, as compared to tests before injections and also to tests after the effects had worn off.
Furthermore, Mori and Mori (2010, 2013) have demonstrated significant effects from a passive
form of facial feedback, where facial expressions were formed, without any muscle action, on
the face of participants with the help of elastic adhesive bandages. Interestingly, since no
muscles were activated, any feedback must have originated from sensations in the skin or from
proprioceptive signals in the cutaneous muscles. Moreover, Dimberg and Söderkvist (2011)
demonstrated that facial feedback was more effective at modulating emotions, as compared to
initiating emotions, and that feedback was equally effective at modulating both positive and
negative emotions. That study also found that effects of facial feedback actions could be
detected several minutes later, a result that calls for further research.
Clinical benefits from manipulating facial muscles have been demonstrated in several studies,
where Botox injections were used to paralyze the corrugator muscles of clinically depressed
patients. The results showed significant mood improvements in patients, and these effects
were attributed to reduced facial feedback from the corrugator muscles (Finzi and Rosenthal
2014; Magid et al. 2014; Wollmer et al. 2012, 2014).
Yet, it remains unclear how facial feedback actually works. The most commonly held theory
states that when certain facial muscles are activated, afferent feedback from muscular
proprioceptive patterns activates corresponding affect programs (Adelmann and Zajonc 1989;
Tomkins 1962). However, sensory feedback from the facial skin has also been proposed as a
possible contributor to facial feedback (Tomkins 1980). Furthermore, the vascular theory of
emotional efference provides another explanation suggesting that facial actions can regulate
brain blood temperature by altering nasal air flow, which in turn could produce changes in
emotional state (Zajonc et al. 1989). However, it is inherently difficult to identify the
neurological basis of the above theories and it also follows that it is difficult to specifically test
the theories. Alternatively, one way forward could be to further explore different effects of
facial feedback and in this way improve the description of how facial feedback effects occur and
thereby extend the boundary conditions of the hypothesis.
