Photo Session Lessons

I find small ways to entertain myself and others and typically my forms of entertainment involve a digital camera and a photo session. I am amazed that as I hold down the camera shutter and shout out an emotion, my friends and I convey the same emotion with a similar expression. I can yell out happy, sad, afraid, surprised, or disgusted and see that we have all portrayed happiness, sadness, fear, surprise and disgust in a very similar manner. I shouldn’t be so shocked by our ability to express an emotion in a similar fashion, for as Charles Darwin (1872) [the father of evolution:] proposed, facial expressions are understood and expressed by all because they are intrinsic. Emotions and feelings are thus commonly conveyed by nonverbal behavior, our silent language represented by our facial expressions and our body movements. Moreover, our expressions of emotions and feelings are commonly understood by others and we recognize these emotions in others, because they are innate (Darwin, 1872). Furthermore, facial depictions of primary emotions, like the ones I shout out during a photo session, are recognized world wide; though people do tend to recognize the expressions of someone in their own ethnic group more precisely then the expressions of someone in a group that is not as common to them (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002).



In addition, Darwin (1872) proposed that we recognize emotions that are crucial for our own survival. For example, my roommate can recognize when I am happy or sad and may ask why I am in such a chipper or down state. On one (rare) occasion, I came stomping into our apartment, she took one look at me and recognized that I was (very) angry. I know now that she recognized my emotions by my body language and my facial expression and I recognize that as I looked at her with my (displaced) anger, her expression changed; she began to mimic my expression, in agreement with studies by Dimberg & Ohman that have shown that an angry facial expression can lead a viewer to frown (1996). As a mechanism of “survival” my roommate did not ask what was wrong, rather, for her own safety, remained silent and gave me the room and some time to calm down. My facial expression must have had components of the universal portrayal of anger.

Interestingly, we value these nonverbal cues, our facial expression and body language, enough, to attempt to depict our facial expression over our online communication in order to get across the meaning of our written words (Sanderson, 1997). I can admit I fall guilty to overusing emotion icons as I write emails or write on people’s facebook walls, in an attempt to clarify and animate myself to by reader. My words are helping others form an impression of me and I want to portray myself as I am in order to make a good impression (Which in itself another blog entry, saved for some other day :)

Darwin, C. (1872). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. London: John Murray.

Dimberg, U., & Ohman, A. (1996).behold the wrath: Psychophysiological responses to facial stimuli. Motivation and Emotion, 20, 149-181.

Elfenbein, H.A., & Ambady, N. (2002). On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis. Physchological Bulletin, 128, 203-235.

Sanderson, D.W. (1997). Smileys. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.