
Paula M NiedenthalUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of Psychology
Paula M Niedenthal
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Publications (185)
People routinely use facial expressions to communicate successfully and to regulate other's behaviour, yet modelling the form and meaning of these facial behaviours has proven surprisingly complex. One reason for this difficulty may lie in an over-reliance on the assumptions inherent in existing theories of facial expression - specifically that (1)...
Background
Social and familial consequences of pacifier use remain poorly understood. The present study attempts to shed more light on the characteristics of parents using pacifiers with their infants and to explore how pacifier use affects perceptions of infant emotionality, maternal stress, and parental efficacy.
Methods
The study sample consist...
Children with facial differences, such as repaired cleft lip and palate (CLP), may present with reduced capacity for sensorimotor simulation, particularly in the form of facial mimicry. This study examined whether facial mimicry, emotion recognition, and empathy skills are reduced in children with CLP when compared with sex/age-matched controls. A...
Objective
To examine the facial movements children with cleft lip and palate (CLP) employ to express basic emotions. Ability of observers to interpret facial expressions of children with CLP was also considered.
Design
Prospective case-control design.
Setting
Outpatient craniofacial anomalies clinic.
Patients
Twenty-five children with CLP (age 8...
Face masks that prevent disease transmission obscure facial expressions, impairing nonverbal communication. We assessed the impact of lower (masks) and upper (sunglasses) face coverings on emotional valence judgments of clearly valenced (fearful, happy) and ambiguously valenced (surprised) expressions, the latter of which have both positive and neg...
Cultural differences in emotion expression, experience, and regulation can cause misunderstandings with lasting effects on interpersonal, intergroup, and international relations. We propose that the ancestral diversity of regions of the world, determined by the migration of humans over centuries, accounts for significant variation in cultures of em...
In the United States the color red has come to represent the Republican party, and blue the Democratic party, in maps of voting patterns. Here we test the hypothesis that voting maps dichotomized into red and blue states leads people to overestimate political polarization compared to maps in which states are represented with continuous gradations o...
Advancements in affective science and robotics have allowed researchers to consider how robots can express emotions appropriately in human- robot interaction. Borrowing previous work from the- ories of nonverbal expressions of emotion, we de- signed 24 distinct emotional expressions for a reading companion robot–Misty II. We validated the expres- s...
Historically, exposure to dissimilar others (“strangers”) was a physiologically arousing event—resulting in avoidance, distrust, and even conflict. Despite this, contemporary migration patterns are increasing intergroup contact. What gives rise to an individual’s ability to regulate their arousal such that social engagement with outgroup members is...
Cooperating with another person requires communicating intentions and coordinating behavior. People often accomplish these tasks using spoken language, but verbal communication is not always available. Here, we test the hypothesis that, to establish successful cooperative interaction, people compensate for the temporary loss of one means, verbal co...
Over evolution, humans have primarily responded to dissimilar others (“strangers”) with flight or fight responses. Despite this, contemporary migration patterns are increasing intergroup contact. What gives rise to an individual’s ability to regulate their arousal such that social engagement with outgroup members is possible? We propose that cultur...
Cooperating with another person requires communicating intentions and coordinating behavior. People often accomplish these tasks using spoken language, but verbal communication is not always available. Here, we test the hypothesis that, to establish successful cooperative interaction, people compensate for the temporary loss of one means, verbal co...
According to the familiar axiom, the eyes are the window to the soul. However, wearing masks to prevent the spread of viruses such as COVID-19 involves obscuring a large portion of the face. Do the eyes carry sufficient information to allow for the accurate perception of emotions in dynamic expressions obscured by masks? What about the perception o...
The set of 30 stimulating commentaries on our target article helps to define the areas of our initial position that should be reiterated or else made clearer and, more importantly, the ways in which moderators of and extensions to the SIMS can be imagined. In our response, we divide the areas of discussion into (1) a clarification of our meaning of...
Recent application of theories of embodied or grounded cognition to the recognition and interpretation of facial expression of emotion has led to an explosion of research in psychology and the neurosciences. However, despite the accelerating number of reported findings, it remains unclear how the many component processes of emotion and their neural...
Fiction reading experience affects emotion recognition abilities, yet the causal link remains underspecified. Current theory suggests fiction reading promotes the simulation of fictional minds, which supports emotion recognition skills. We examine the extent to which contextualized statistical experience with emotion category labels in language is...
Cultural context shapes individuals' valuation of emotions. Although studies have documented cultural differences in beliefs about the utility of negative emotions, little is known about how such cultural valuation is associated with physiological stress responses. In the present work, we examined whether East Asians and European Americans differ i...
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00042-0
Smiles are nonverbal signals that convey social information and influence the social behavior of recipients, but the precise form and social function of a smile can be variable. In previous work, we have proposed that there are at least three physically distinct types of smiles associated with specific social functions: reward smiles signal positiv...
The U.S. political landscape is increasingly polarized. Political polarization is made especially salient when visualized using a two-tone U.S. map with red Republican-leaning states and blue Democrat-leaning states. However, such dichotomization conceals the true spectrum of political opinion and voting patterns. We asked whether dichotomizing map...
According to the familiar axiom, the eyes are the window to the soul. However, wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 involves occluding a large portion of the face. Do the eyes carry all of the information we need to perceive each other’s emotions? We addressed this question in two studies. In the first, 162 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)...
A recent “rural resentment” hypothesis holds that the rise of conservative politicians in the state of Wisconsin is explained by rural residents’ resentment of beneficiaries of economic advantages, especially government employees (Cramer, Katherine J. 2016. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. U...
Through their nuanced ability to reinforce, reassure, and judge, smiles accomplish many tasks in daily interactions. A recent approach proposes that there are at least three distinct types of smiles: reward, affiliation, and dominance, which are predicted to take different physical forms and serve unique functions in social communication. Although...
[CHAPTER] The reproduction of another individual’s emotions in the self – the embodiment of perceived emotions – has been demonstrated to constitute one mechanism for emotional information processing. That is, seeing someone’s emotion expressions and using one’s own face to make the same expression helps the perceiver represent the emotion of the o...
In most primates, eye contact is an implicit signal of threat, and often connotes social status and imminent physical aggression. However, in humans and some of the gregarious nonhuman primates, eye contact is tolerated more and may be used to communicate other emotional and mental states. What accounts for the variation in this critical social cue...
The present work advances the science of the smile by investigating how perceivers mentally represent this heterogenous expression. Across both perception- and production-based tasks, we report evidence that perceivers mentally represent reward, affiliation, and dominance smiles as distinct categories associated with specific behaviors, social cont...
Others’ facial expressions can influence whether we trust them. For example, smiles tend to elicit positive impressions and increased cooperation. But how are smiles perceived when displayed by someone who has violated our trust? Here, we investigated the effects of reward, affiliation, and dominance smiles displayed after intergroup trust violatio...
Background and objectives:
Negative interpretation biases are postulated to play etiological and maintaining roles in social anxiety (SA). However, empirical support for interpretation biases of facial expression in SA is inconsistent. Given the importance of signals of (dis)approval in SA, our objective was to examine whether SA is associated wit...
Spontaneous facial mimicry is modulated by many factors, and often needs to be suppressed to comply with social norms. The neural basis for the inhibition of facial mimicry was investigated in a combined functional magnetic resonance imaging and electromyography study in 39 healthy participants. In an operant conditioning paradigm, face identities...
Sometimes risk involves taking actions that in and of themselves elicit emotion, often fearful emotions. Across two studies we test the hypothesis that preventing facial actions associated with fear and anxiety responses during a risky decision task leads to greater risk taking. We first demonstrate that while performing the balloon analogue risk t...
Human emotional behavior varies across cultures. Smiling at a passing stranger on the street may seem perfectly normal in one culture and profoundly strange or even suspicious in another. What are the origins of cultural differences in emotional expression, communication, and regulation? We review new evidence in favor of one answer to this questio...
One of the biggest challenges in the study of emotion–cognition interaction is addressing the question of whether and how emotions influence processes of perception as distinct from other higher-level cognitive processes. Most theories of emotion agree that an emotion episode begins with a sensory experience – such as a visual percept – that elicit...
The present research comprises six experiments that investigated racial biases in the perception of positive emotional expressions. In an initial study, we demonstrated that White participants distinguished more in their happiness ratings of Duchenne (“true”) and non-Duchenne (“false”) smiles on White compared with Black faces (Experiment 1). In a...
Recognising a facial expression is more difficult when the expresser's body conveys incongruent affect. Existing research has documented such interference for universally recognisable bodily expressions. However, it remains unknown whether learned, conventional gestures can interfere with facial expression processing. Study 1 participants (N = 62)...
What are facial expressions for? In social-functional accounts, they are efficient adaptations that are used flexibly to address the problems inherent to successful social living. Facial expressions both broadcast emotions and regulate the emotions of perceivers. Research from my laboratory focuses on the human smile and demonstrates how this very...
Recent findings demonstrate that heterogeneity of long-history migration predicts present-day emotion behaviors and norms. Residents of countries characterized by high ancestral diversity display emotion expressions that are easier to decode by observers, endorse norms of higher emotion expressivity, and smile more in response to certain stimuli th...
Recognition of affect expressed in the face is disrupted when the body expresses an incongruent affect. Existing research has documented such interference for universally recognizable bodily expressions. However, it remains unknown whether learned, conventional gestures can interfere with facial expression processing. Study 1 participants (N = 62)...
Emotion concepts are important. They help us to understand, experience and predict human behaviour. Emotion concepts also link the realm of the abstract with the realm of bodily experience and actions. Accordingly, the key question is how such concepts are created, represented and used. Embodied cognition theories hold that concepts are grounded in...
Recent findings demonstrate that heterogeneity of long-history migration predicts present-day emotion behaviors and norms. Residents of countries characterized by high ancestral diversity display emotion expressions that are easier to decode by observers, endorse norms of higher emotion expressivity, and smile more in response to certain stimuli th...
When people are being evaluated, their whole body responds. Verbal feedback causes robust activation in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. What about nonverbal evaluative feedback? Recent discoveries about the social functions of facial expression have documented three morphologically distinct smiles, which serve the functions of reinfo...
Recent research suggests that conceptual or emotional factors could influence the perceptual processing of stimuli. In this article, we aimed to evaluate the effect of social information (positive, negative, or no information related to the character of the target) on subjective (perceived and felt valence and arousal), physiological (facial mimicr...
The human smile is highly variable in both its form and the social contexts in which it is displayed. A social-functional account identifies three distinct smile expressions defined in terms of their effects on the perceiver: reward smiles reinforce desired behavior; affiliation smiles invite and maintain social bonds; and dominance smiles manage h...
A smile is the most frequent facial expression, but not all smiles are equal. A social-functional account holds that smiles of reward, affiliation, and dominance serve basic social functions, including rewarding behavior, bonding socially, and negotiating hierarchy. Here, we characterize the facial-expression patterns associated with these three ty...
Despite their relative universality, nonverbal displays of emotion are often sources of cross-cultural misunderstandings. The present article considers the relevance of historical and present socio-ecological contexts, such as heterogeneity of long-history migration, pathogen prevalence, and residential mobility for cross-cultural variation in emot...
Objective:
Here, we develop an integrative account of the roles of emotion in decision-making. In Part I, we illustrate how emotional inputs into decisions may rely on physiological signals from emotions experienced while making the decision, and we review evidence suggesting that the failure to represent the emotional meaning of options can often...
In the past decade, different studies have suggested that high-order factors could influence the perceptual processing of emotional stimuli. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the effect of congruent vs. incongruent social information (positive, negative or no information related to the character of the target) on subjective (perceived and felt va...
The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) has many potential social benefits. For example, intranasal administration of OT appears to trigger caregiving behavior and to improve the recognition of emotional facial expressions. But the mechanism for these effects is not yet clear. Recent findings relating OT to action imitation and to the visual processing of t...
George Lakoff (2015) discusses how emotion metaphors reflect the discrete bodily states associated with each emotion. The analysis raises questions about the context for and frequency of use of emotion metaphors and, indeed, emotion labels (e.g., “angry”), per se. An assumption implicit to most theories of emotion is that emotion language is just a...
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Importance
The ability of patients with unilateral facial paralysis to recognize and appropriately judge facial expressions remains underexplored.Objective
To test the effects of unilateral facial paralysis on the recognition of and judgments about facial expressions of emotion and to evaluate the asymmetry of facial mimicry.Design, Setting, and...
When we observe a facial expression of emotion, we often mimic it. This automatic mimicry reflects underlying sensorimotor simulation that supports accurate emotion recognition. Why this is so is becoming more obvious: emotions are patterns of expressive, behavioral, physiological, and subjective feeling responses. Activation of one component can t...
Recent work (Rychlowska et al., 2015) demonstrated the power of a relatively new cultural dimension, historical heterogeneity, in predicting cultural differences in the endorsement of emotion expression norms. Historical heterogeneity describes the number of source countries that have contributed to a country’s present-day population over the last...
Looking at another person's facial expression of emotion can trigger the same neural processes involved in producing the expression, and such responses play a functional role in emotion recognition. Disrupting individuals' facial action, for example, interferes with verbal emotion recognition tasks. We tested the hypothesis that facial responses al...
Individuals spontaneously categorize other people on the basis of their gender, ethnicity, and age. But what about the emotions they express? In this research we tested the hypothesis that facial expressions are similar to other social categories in that they can function as contextual cues to control attention. Specifically, we associated expressi...
Abstract
A small number of facial expressions may be universal in that they are produced by the same basic affective states and recognized as such throughout the world. However, other aspects of emotionally expressive behavior vary widely across culture. Just why do they vary? We propose that some cultural differences in expressive behavior are de...
Previous studies have revealed a gender bias in ratings of the valence and intensity of supraliminally presented facial expressions of emotion such that positive emotions receive higher ratings when expressed by females and negative emotions receive higher ratings when expressed by males. However, surprisingly, this gender bias has not been investi...
• The structure of the chapter is roughly as follows. We begin by contrasting embodiment theories with their main competitors—theories that emphasize the amodal, propositional nature of mental representations. We then review some evidence for embodied processing in more cognitive domains. We then move on to a detailed description of research on emb...
When forming basic social impressions, it is important to quickly and accurately classify facial expressions (including their spontaneity). Early studies on emotion perception, employing static pictures in the chimeric-face paradigm, demonstrated that expressions shown on the left hemi-face (LHF) were rated as more intense, compared to the right he...
Research shows that pacifiers disrupt infants’ mimicry of facial expressions. This experiment
examines whether pacifiers interfere with caretakers’ ability to mimic infants’
emotions. Adults saw photographs of infants with or without a pacifier. When infants
had pacifiers, perceivers showed reduced EMG activity to infants’ smiles. Smiles of
infants...
Findings in the neuroimaging literature suggest that separate brain circuitries are involved when individuals perform emotional compared to nonemotional working memory (WM) tasks. Here we test this hypothesis with behavioural measures. We predicted that the conceptual processing of affect would be disrupted more by concurrent affective than nonaffe...
The mechanisms through which people perceive different types of smiles and judge their authenticity remain unclear. Here, 19 different types of smiles were created based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), using highly controlled, dynamic avatar faces. Participants observed short videos of smiles while their facial mimicry was measured with...
Recent research suggests that facial mimicry underlies accurate interpretation of subtle facial expressions. In three experiments, we manipulated mimicry and tested its role in judgments of the genuineness of true and false smiles. Experiment 1 used facial EMG to show that a new mouthguard technique for blocking mimicry modifies both the amount and...
Smiles are complex facial expressions that carry multiple meanings. Recent literature suggests that deep processing of smiles via embodied simulation can be triggered by achieved eye contact. Three studies supported this prediction. In Study 1, participants rated the emotional impact of portraits, which varied in eye contact and smiling. Smiling po...
Research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that facial mimicry plays a causal
role in understanding facial expression of emotion. Accurate understanding of facial
emotion, in turn, grounds emotional development. Are pacifiers, which disrupt facial
mimicry in the user, associated with compromised emotional development? We examined
facial mimic...
Answers to the question "What are human emotions for?" have stimulated highly productive programs of research on emotional phenomena in psychology and neuroscience in the past decade. Although a variety of functions have been proposed and examined at different levels of abstraction, what is undeniable is that when emotional processing is compromise...
The high sensitivity and need to adjust to others' expectations may make Japanese, compared to Americans, more anxious in interpersonal contexts and especially more vigilant to signs of disapproval (such as the disappearance of happiness from another’s face) but not to other signs (such as the disappearance of sadness). By using a morph movie parad...
The judgment that a smile is based on "true," usually positive, feelings affects social interaction. However, the processes underlying the interpretation of a smile as being more or less genuine are not well understood. The aim of the present research was to test predictions of the Simulation of Smiles Model (SIMS) proposed by Niedenthal, Mermillod...
Parkinson's disease (PD) and Tourette's syndrome (TS) lead to important motor disorders among patients such as possible facial amimia in PD and tics in Tourette's syndrome. Under the grounded cognition framework that shows the importance of motor embodiment in emotional feeling (Niedenthal, 2007), both types of pathology with motor symptoms should...
This chapter briefly reviews models of the conceptual system on which most research in social cognition research was based until very recently. It then outlines the principles of another account, which is the theory of embodied or grounded cognition. Relevant research findings are presented to demonstrate how several dimensions of experience, such...
The set of 30 stimulating commentaries on our target article helps to define the areas of our initial position that should be reiterated or else made clearer and, more importantly, the ways in which moderators of and extensions to the SIMS can be imagined. In our response, we divide the areas of discussion into (1) a clarification of our meaning of...
Recent application of theories of embodied or grounded cognition to the recognition and interpretation of facial expression of emotion has led to an explosion of research in psychology and the neurosciences. However, despite the accelerating number of reported findings, it remains unclear how the many component processes of emotion and their neural...
Zajonc and Markus published a chapter in 1984 that proposed solutions to the difficult problem of modeling interactions between cognition and emotion. The most radical of their proposals was the importance of the motor system in information processing. These initial preoccupations, when wedded with the vascular theory of emotional efference (VTEE),...