A preview of this full-text is provided by American Psychological Association.
Content available from Emotion
This content is subject to copyright. Terms and conditions apply.
Duchenne Smile, Emotional Experience, and Autonomic
Reactivity: A Test of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis
Robert Soussignan
Hoˆpital de la Salpeˆtrie`re
This study examined the modulatory function of Duchenne and non-Duchenne
smiles on subjective and autonomic components of emotion. Participants were
asked to hold a pencil in their mouth to either facilitate or inhibit smiles and were
not instructed to contract specific muscles. Five conditions—namely lips pressing,
low-level non-Duchenne smiling, high-level non-Duchenne smiling, Duchenne
smiling, and control—were produced while participants watched videoclips that
were evocative of positive or negative affect. Participants who displayed Duchenne
smiles reported more positive experience when pleasant scenes and humorous
cartoons were presented. Furthermore, they tended to exhibit different patterns of
autonomic arousal when viewing positive scenes. These results support the facial
feedback hypothesis and suggest that facial feedback has more powerful effects
when facial configurations represent valid analogs of basic emotional expressions.
The human face has long been recognized as a
powerful signaling system serving both inter- and in-
traindividual regulatory functions. Implicit in such a
view is the assumption that facial behavior constitutes
not only the expressive output of inner emotional
states or social motives but also an input to the sub-
jective experience of emotion. The idea that afferent
feedback from expressive behavior may play a causal
role in the experience of emotion takes its roots in part
from Charles Darwin’s and William James’s state-
ments. Darwin (1872/1965) claimed that the intensity
of emotional experience could be regulated by en-
hancing or inhibiting the expression, whereas James
(1890) proposed that subjective feeling was the result
of peripheral bodily changes (i.e., visceral and striated
muscle activity) that directly follow the perception of
the eliciting event. The influence of these views can
be seen in more recent theories of emotion, which
assign to facial expression a primary role in the sub-
jective experience of emotion (Izard, 1971; Tomkins,
1962). This gave rise to the so-called facial feedback
hypothesis (FFH), which stated that facial movement
could influence emotional experience (Tourangeau &
Ellsworth, 1979).
In the course of empirical investigation of the FFH,
several variants of this hypothesis have been distin-
guished. First, Tourangeau and Ellsworth (1979)
raised three questions derived from the FFH: (a) Is an
appropriate facial expression necessary for the sub-
jective experience of emotion? (necessity hypothesis);
(b) Is a facial expression sufficient to produce an emo-
tional experience, even in the absence of an evocative
event? (sufficiency hypothesis); and (c) Does the
strength of a facial expression covary positively with
the intensity of emotional experience? (monotonicity
hypothesis). Whereas the view that facial displays are
necessary for experiencing emotion has not been sup-
ported (e.g., Ferna´ndez-Dols & Ruiz-Belda, 1995;
Hess, Kappas, McHugo, Lanzetta, & Kleck, 1992),
there is substantial evidence in favor of the suffi-
ciency and monotonicity hypotheses (see Hess et al.,
1992; McIntosh, 1996).
Although the several variants of the FFH do not
necessarily imply causality between face and emo-
tion, they all postulate that facial action can initiate
(sufficiency hypothesis) and/or modulate the subjec-
tive experience of emotion (Adelmann & Zajonc,
1989; McIntosh, 1996). The initiation hypothesis
I thank Nathalie Fontaine for her assistance in the data
collection. I am grateful to Patrick Mollaret for helpful com-
ments concerning the design of this research. I also thank
Paul Gendreau, Benoist Schaal, and Rita Compatangelo for
valuable comments on an earlier version of this article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-
dressed to Robert Soussignan, Laboratoire Vulne´rabilite´,
Adaptation et Psychopathologie, CNRS UMR 7593, Pavil-
lon Cle´rambault, Hoˆ pital de la Salpeˆtrie`re, 47, Bd de
l’Hoˆpital, 75013 Paris, France. E-mail: soussign@ext.
jussieu.fr
Emotion Copyright 2002 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
2002, Vol. 2, No. 1, 52–74 1528-3542/02/$5.00 DOI: 10.1037//1528-3542.2.1.52
52
This
document
is
copyrighted
by
the
American
Psychological
Association
or
one
of
its
allied
publishers.
This
article
is
intended
solely
for
the
personal
use
of
the
individual
user
and
is
not
to
be
disseminated
broadly.
