Deck 5: Expression of Emotion

Question 1

When do faces and the information they communicate become important stimuli that a developing child attends to?

A)When the child gains the ability to imitate others' expressions
B)Soon after birth
C)When the child acquires language for categorizing and explaining facial expressions
D)When the child gains the ability to crawl, as this helps them understand gaze directions as cues

Answer 1

B

Question 2

What does the read-out view argue?

A)There is a close relationship between internally felt emotion and outward expression
B)Expressions are largely a read-out of people's desires to influence or communicate with each other
C)Recognizing the meaning of another person's facial expression involves reading out the expression using your own face
D)The subjective experience of an emotion arises from feedback from your facial muscles during expression

Answer 2

A

Question 3

Which of the following hypothetical findings would most directly support the behavioral ecology view of facial expression?

A)A cross-cultural comparison of emotion expressions reveals that regardless of the environment, certain emotions trigger the same pattern of facial activity
B)When participants' facial muscles are prevented from moving while they watch a sad movie, they report feeling less intense emotions
C)People were asked to report their internal feelings while their facial expressions were recorded with EMG; the two were highly correlated regardless of the social context
D)People laugh harder and smile more when they are at a live comedy performance compared to watching the performance on a TV, because they want to signal to the comedian that she is funny

Answer 3

D

Question 4

What does the facial feedback hypothesis propose?

A)Facial movements that originally served biological functions eventually evolved to provide feedback to others about the organism's emotion state
B)Facial expressions contribute to your emotional state through sensory input from the face to the brain
C)People automatically mimic one another's facial expressions using their own facial muscles
D)Facial expressions are the result of a feedback loop between social intentions and emotion states

Question 5

It is common folk knowledge that simply smiling can make you feel better, while frowning can make your bad mood worse. What is the scientific name for this idea?

A)The facial feedback hypothesis
B)Embodied simulation
C)Behavioral ecology
D)The mood congruency hypothesis

Question 6

In 1988, why did Strack, Martin, and Stepper ask participants to hold pens in their mouths?

A)To control for extraneous movement during EMG recordings
B)To see if they would rate cartoons as funnier when they were ""smiling"" compared to when they were not allowed to smile
C)To see whether inducing participants to be in a good mood helps them do boring, uncomfortable tasks for a longer period of time
D)So that they could more easily align their faces with those of their interaction partners, which tends to trigger facial mimicry

Question 7

I am a doctor who has just read about the facial feedback hypothesis (FFH) and has a patient with treatment-resistant major depression disorder. What treatment might I try that is based directly on evidence supporting the FFH?

A)Encourage her to make more eye contact when she is talking to others
B)Have the patient hold a pen in her mouth so that her mouth is prevented from smiling
C)Inject parts of the patient's face with Botox
D)Tell her to do more enjoyable activities in the presence of others, since this will cause her to laugh and smile more

Question 8

The theory of embodied simulation attempts to explain what process?

A)How feeling states in the brain translate to expressions on the face and in the body
B)How people perceive and recognize the meaning of others' emotion expressions
C)How the various components of an emotion state-such as autonomic nervous system activity and facial expressions-combine to form a cohesive experience
D)How infants learn what in the environment is good or bad via social referencing

Question 9

Which of the following statements about facial mimicry is true?

A)Facial mimicry is a largely intentional and non-automatic process
B)Facial mimicry does not seem to support accurate emotion recognition
C)Evidence shows that without facial mimicry, people cannot even see the expressions of others
D)People are more likely to mimic the expressions of people they like

Question 10

Which of the following statements about research on bodily expression of emotion is not true?

A)Researchers have shown that people need to see videos of actors with visible faces in order to recognize emotion from movement
B)Some researchers have identified prototypical actions, like jumping up and down, which are easily recognized as expressing specific emotions
C)Some researchers have identified features of movement, such as velocity and fluidity, that are recognizable as expressing specific emotions
D)People need relatively little information presented for relatively brief amounts of time to accurately identify what emotion is expressed in a dynamic body movement

Question 11

In response to a teacher's challenging question, a bored student replies, ""I don't know."" Which of the following components of his speech would not qualify as prosody?

A)The word ""don't""
B)The falling pitch of his voice
C)The tempo of his speech
D)The apathetic pause he takes before responding

Question 12

Some researchers (e.g., Bachorowski, 1999) argue that the voice alone cannot express discrete emotions. What is the primary feature of emotion that is identifiable in speech, according to these researchers?

A)Social intention
B)Valence
C)Physiological arousal
D)Approach/avoidance

Question 13

What supposedly uniquely human phenomenon shares features with emotion communication in monkeys, according to Charles Snowdon?

A)Spoken language
B)Music
C)Laughter
D)Sarcasm

Question 14

Aviezer, Trope, & Todorov (2012) had people identify the emotions expressed in photographs of tennis players who had either just won or lost a match. What property of combined emotion expressions (that is, whole-person expressions involving both the face and body) did they reveal?

A)At extreme intensity levels, the face reveals a lot more about the valence of an emotion expression than does the body
B)Naturalistic emotion expressions are unpredictable and difficult to recognize, so perceivers always have to rely on contextual information from the environment
C)The body is always more informative than the face in revealing whether a person is feeling positive or negative, suggesting emotion science's focus on the face is misguided
D)At extreme intensity levels, positive and negative emotions are nearly indistinguishable on the face, so cues from the body can help indicate the valence of the expresser's feelings

Question 15

Regarding the origin of facial expressions, many contemporary researchers endorse an interactionist perspective. What does this mean?

A)They agree that specific expressions are the result of an interaction between early developmental learning and cultural learning
B)They believe that there are no fixed or consistent facial expressions associated with different emotions; instead, each expression emerges from a social interaction
C)They agree that there are both biologically innate and culturally learned determinants of how emotions are expressed
D)They believe that the support for universality of facial expression found in the literature is largely the result of increasing cross-cultural interactions due to globalization, rather than being due to any innate human capacities

Question 16

What is the effect of shared social group membership on emotion perception?

A)People engage in more facial mimicry with members of other groups than members of their own social groups
B)Although people have more daily exposure to the expressions of their ingroup members compared to non-group members, there is no documented difference in emotion recognition accuracy between social groups
C)Observers tend to be slightly more accurate in recognizing the emotion expressions of their own group members compared to the expressions of people not in their group
D)Both A and C are true

Question 17

How are facial muscles special compared to other skeletal muscles in the body?

A)They are anchored to the skin, so when they contract, the skin wrinkles and folds
B)They mostly lack proprioceptors
C)They control the openings of sensory organs
D)Both A and C
E)All of the above

Question 18

What is one way in which muscle proprioceptors and cutaneous mechanoreceptors differ?

A)Proprioceptors provide constant information about the locations of muscles and tendons, while mechanoreceptors in the skin are more sensitive to changes in pressure
B)Proprioceptors occur primarily in facial muscles while mechanoreceptors occur only in the limbs
C)Proprioceptors provide your brain with information about the warping of your skin, while mechanoreceptors tell your brain about the degree of muscle contraction
D)Proprioceptors communicate directly with the cortex, while mechanoreceptors communicate with sensory nuclei in the brainstem

Question 19

Which of the following cranial nerves is responsible for motor output to the facial muscles of the forehead, lips, and cheeks?

A)Occulomotor nerve
B)Trigeminal nerve
C)Facial nerve
D)Voluntary motor nerve

Question 20

Which of the following cranial nerves is responsible for motor output to the jaw and sensory feedback from most of the face?

A)Occulomotor nerve
B)Trigeminal nerve
C)Facial nerve
D)Voluntary motor nerve

Question 21

What feature of the brain systems involved in producing facial expressions hints at the face's importance for emotion?

A)Without facial expressions, the brain cannot experience an emotion state
B)We have no voluntary control over our facial muscles, suggesting they are under the full control of the brain's emotion system
C)Facial muscles are ennervated exclusively by a direct connection from the hypothalamus, which is associated with emotion
D)Facial muscles are controlled by a distribution of cortical and subcortical areas, receiving indirect connections from systems associated with emotion

Question 22

When a researcher asks whether evidence exists that the facial expression for sadness is universal, what do they mean?

A)Is there evidence that sadness is expressed similarly across human cultures?
B)Is there evidence that all mammals are capable of experiencing and expressing sadness?
C)Is there evidence that most cultures display sadness so long as they have a word for it?
D)Is there evidence that globalization has caused sadness to become widespread in the last century?

Question 23

Which of the following best describes Charles Darwin's theory of the origin of facial expressions?

A)Initially random, small facial movements became useful communicative signals for organisms, much in the way sexual selection can result in bizarre traits becoming bigger, such as peacock feathers
B)Each mammalian species evolved its own unique set of expressions, essentially from ""scratch,"" because species have such different facial musculature
C)Facial expressions begain as functional behaviors that solved adaptive problems, and over time these functions became secondary to the communicative value of expressions
D)He noted that individual people and animals often express emotions is highly unique and inconsistent ways, leading him to conclude that associative learning is responsible for the formation of facial expressions
E)He did not believe that the actions involved in facial expressions were random, but were instead pieces of serviceable habits that took on a communicative function over the course of evolution. Facial musculature across mammals is surprisingly well preserved, and in fact Darwin sought to document homologous expressions across species (so B is incorrect)

Question 24

Which facial expression is adaptive because it increases sensory inputs?

A)Anger
B)Fear
C)Sadness
D)Disgust

Question 25

What does the origin of smiling have to do with vocal pitch?

A)Smiling lowers the pitch of your voice, causing you to sound calm and soothing, which is the auditory equivalent of a smile
B)Smiling prevents animals and humans from producing vocalizations, so it is a way to silently signal trust
C)Higher-pitch vocalizations can express friendliness and harmlessness, and altering your vocal tract to produce higher pitches results in a smile-like mouth shape
D)Smiling in humans and nonhumans is always accompanied by a vocalization

Question 26

Van Hooff (1976) suggested that what feature of human facial expression may have originated from our ancestors' ability to move their ears?

A)Our ability to pull our lips back during states like fear and joy
B)Our general lack of expressiveness in the eye area
C)Our use of eye gaze to communicate information about the location of salient stimuli
D)The expressiveness of our eyebrows during various emotion states

Question 27

Researchers have noted similarities in function and appearance between human smiles and the facial expression chimpanzees make when they play. What is the word used to describe such cross-species similarity?

A)Homologous
B)Analogous
C)Convergent evolution
D)Divergent evolution

Question 28

Critics of research on the universality of emotion expression have pointed out how Westernization adds a confound. Which of the following is the best methodological solution to this issue?

A)Rather than trying to use facial expressions from a variety of different cultures, only use stimuli from a Western cultures like the United States
B)Use an open-ended response format instead of forced-choice
C)Rely on nonverbal emotion recognition tasks rather than verbal ones, since translation is an issue
D)Recruit participants in a pre-industrial, isolated culture that has minimal exposure to outside media

Question 29

When Matsumoto and Willingham looked at the facial expressions of winning and losing Olympic and Paralympic athletes, comparing first across cultures and then across sighted and blind athletes, what did they find?

A)Athletes from more individualistic cultures and sighted athletes produced Duchenne smiles if they won, while individuals from collectivistic cultures and blind athletes produced non-Duchenne smiles
B)Regardless of what culture the athletes were from or whether they were sighted or blind, winners typically produced Duchenne smiles and losers tended to express sadness and contempt
C)While they found marked similarity in the expressions of winners and losers across cultures, the blind and sighted athletes differed greatly in their expressions, suggesting a large learning component in facial expression
D)They found that within a culture, both blind and sighted athletes had very similar winning and losing expressions; however, these varied greatly across cultures, suggesting blind individuals acquire expressive dialects in some other way

Question 30

Early in an infant's life, what are the first two facial expressions to emerge that have clear communicative functions?

A)Distress and anger
B)Fear and love
C)Distress and smiles
D)Approach and avoidance