Sociologists believe that there are social norms within societies that are expected to be followed within a community. These social norms are said to dictate the thoughts and actions of an individual and when violated, lead to social conflict or negative affect (Decety & Chaminade, 2003). Norms provide order in society, predictability in relationships, and a general understanding of other’s actions. To be able to abide by these norms, individuals must be able to dictate between socially acceptable and unacceptable behaviors within society. This requires social cognition in order to understand the behaviors of other people, and as behaviors stem from emotions, interpreting others’ emotions is a large part of communication.
Interactions between individuals can be positive or negative and each provokes an emotion that can be interpreted by others through social cues such as vocal, facial, or bodily expressions. An emotion is a complex psychological state involving a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2007). Cross-cultural psychology research suggests that language can have an influence on emotional perception and that there are six common facial expressions in humans, being: happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust. Emotional words extend the depth of emotion categories, and expressive states can involve either high or low levels of activation. It has also been suggested that body language can account for between 50 percent and 70 percent of all communication. Wicker, Perrett, Baron-Cohen, and Decety (2003) found support that direct eye gaze, compared to averted eye gaze, heightens neural activity during the analysis of others’ emotions.
Sympathy and empathy are commonly believed by many psychologists to be a main feature of human nature that motivates prosocial behavior (Decety & Chaminade, 2003). In past research, the term sympathy and the term empathy have been used interchangeably to express an operational response to another’s emotional state. Lauren Wispe (1986) addressed the need of distinction between the two terms, sympathy and empathy, in order to gain further understanding of emotional processing in psychological research. It was proposed that sympathy and empathy are different psychological processes that enable different implications and consequences that require different definitions (Wispe, 1986). From this perspective, empathy refers to the attempt by one self-aware individual to comprehend without prejudice the positive and negative experiences of another individual, while sympathy refers to the enhanced awareness of the suffering of another person as something to be alleviated.
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Heidi L. Maibom (2009) discussed the concepts of sympathy and empathy as primitive foundations of ways of morally relating to others. However, one can distinguish an even more primitive concept, emotional contagion, as it can also be seen in nonhuman animals and neonates. Emotional contagion is defined as the experience of an emotion in response to a homologous emotion in someone else. Although it has been argued that emotional contagion is a rudimentary form or precursor of empathy and/or sympathy, the idea that it instead aids in the formation of empathy and/or sympathy is more logically supported (Maibom, 2009).
Decety and Chaminade (2003) hypothesized that a combination of sympathy and empathy is elicited in everyday life and that the concepts together reflect how individuals automatically interrelate with other individuals. As empathy is said to be an unconscious process while sympathy is a conscious process, Hodges and Wegner (1997) theorized the concept of automatic empathy which was later characterized as a “concern mechanism” due to empathetic reactions occurring automatically and not deliberately. This is correlated with intersubjective sympathy which refers to an infant being predisposed to be sensitive and responsive to the subjective states of others which can be seen through face-to-face interactions and the imitation ability of various body movements (Decety & Chaminade, 2003). Sonnby-Borgstrom, Jonsson, and Svensson (2008) found that women amplified imitative responses towards happy vs angry faces. Due to this, this study includes female actors instead of only male actors to see if there is an effect on the capacity of emotional responses.
Kassam, Markey, Cherkassky, Loewenstein, and Just (2013) conducted a study to demonstrate that emotions can be identified on the basis of neural activation. It was found that the four dimensions underlying the activation patterns of emotion are valence, arousal, sociality, and lust. The findings of the study suggest a structure for neural representations and provides further understanding for theories involving emotional processing. By producing a normative model for emotional responses and neural activation patterns, an individual’s response to perceived emotions may have predictability.
This study will extend past research by including an anger context and expression variable. E. Cummings, Vogel, J. Cummings, and El-Sheikh (1989) examined children’s responses to anger and found that all angry interactions were perceived as negative events and elicited negative emotions. This study aims to challenge this finding when mismatch conditions are induced. If the motor emotional expression is happy while telling a story with the emotional context of anger, will the perceived and elicited emotions still be negative?
In my study, I will be finding out if there is a relationship between the narrative content of a story and the motor emotional expression of the story-teller and emotional responses. I am hypothesizing that (a) the amount of sympathy felt would be reduced when a mismatch occurred between narrative content of the stories and the emotional expression shown by the actors, (b) mismatch conditions would provoke feelings of dislike due to the violation of social norms, and (c) specific neural pathways are activated for different perceived emotions.
Method
Participants
Five healthy female and 5 healthy male volunteers participated. They gave written informed consent before the experiment, and no subject had a history of a neurological, major medical, or psychiatric disorder.
Materials
Four semi-professional female stage actors and four semi-professional male actors were paid for their participation to tell the different stories. Stories were written for each of the values of the narrative content of the story (happy, sad, angry, and neutral) prior to filming the videos A set of four stories (one happy, one sad, one angry, and one neutral) was assigned to each actor, along with the instruction to tell each story with four different expressions (happy, sad, angry, or neutral). All stories were adjusted to the actor’s age and gender so that the story appeared realistic to the speaker.
The videos were recorded in color and in a quiet environment using a Cannon digital camera. All actors were recorded in front of a black background and were angled in the same lighting. The videos were shot close up, only showing the actors’ face and chest, and were edited after to make each the same length and remove any hesitations.
This study will be conducted using multiple measures to examine emotional responses including PET scanning for a neuroimaging analysis, physiological measures such as skin conductance, blood volume pulse, and respiratory rates, as well as behavioral measures which consisted of scale ratings.
Design and Procedure
The experimental conditions were based on a factorial design. The factors included the narrative content of the story (NCS; four values, happy, H; sad, S; angry, A; and neutral, N) and the motor emotional expression of the actor (four values, happy, H; sad, S; angry, A; and neutral, N). A video-clip of an actor telling one story in the first-person tense was shown for each of the conditions as the stimulus to provoke different emotions. To keep the stimuli well balanced between conditions each clip was the same length and contained equal emotional context throughout the entire clip. All videos were shown to a group of 10 individuals who were different from the subjects who were scanned but in the same age range to ensure that the videos were experimentally valid. Each person was asked to watch each video and rate whether the story was persuasive and whether the facial expressions of emotion were congruent with the narrative content of the story.
At the end of each video, participants were asked to answer two separate questions using non-graduated analogical scales. The first question was “What did you think of this person’s mood?” and the second, “How likable did you find this person?” The questions were presented through the same visual display as the videos, with the PC used to record physiological data. Participants were instructed to choose between “happy,” “sad,” “angry,” and “neutral” and then used the computer mouse to move a slider on a continuous scale with not at all and very much at the extremes of the scale for the first question, and with “not at all” or “very much” for the second one. The scales were then divided into equal intervals by a program that scored the ratings from − 100 to + 100.
The 9 conditions (HS, HH, HA, HN, SA, SS, SN, AN, AA, NN) were duplicated once so that 18 scans were recorded for each individual. The order of conditions was partially randomized so that each condition yielded a strong reaction. The constraints of the study required each participant to view each actor twice, once for each type of story but with different expressions.
A mixed repeated measures ANOVA will be used to study the effects of mismatch conditions (congruent expressions or mismatch expressions) on emotional responses and attitudes. The independent variables of the narrative content of the story and motor emotional expression will be manipulated to discover effect on emotional response. General psychology students will be recruited through their current teachers and will receive credit toward their research experience requirement. For non-psychology students, a series of fliers will be posted at approved areas around the Kennesaw State University campus with an explanation of the study as well as state that no monetary compensation will be offered. Participants will be required to complete and informed consent in order to be included in the study.
Analysis Plan
In this experiment, I plan on finding out if there is a relationship between the narrative content of a story and the motor emotional expression of the story-teller and emotional responses. I am hypothesizing that (a) the amount of sympathy felt would be reduced when a mismatch occurred between narrative content of the stories and the emotional expression shown by the actors, (b) mismatch conditions would provoke feelings of dislike due to the violation of social norms, and (c) specific neural pathways are activated for different perceived emotions. The dependent variable, emotional responses, will be reported through scale ratings and functional neuroimaging analysis using PET scanning. An alpha level of .05 will be set as the criterion for significance.
A mixed repeated measures ANOVA will be used to determine the effects of mismatch conditions (congruent expressions or mismatch expressions) on emotional responses and attitudes. The dependent variable will be the reported emotional responses. The independent variables will be the narrative content of the story (happy, sad, angry, or neutral) and the motor emotional expression of the story-teller (happy, sad, angry, or neutral). If the interaction is significant, Post Hoc test will be conducted to determine the differences between conditions. Pearson’s r will be calculated with an alpha level of .05 set as criterion for significance. The coefficient of determination will also be calculated to determine proportion of variance in one variable accounted for by the other.
Discussion
The purpose of my research study is to explore how mismatch conditions affect emotional responses. Human behavior is dictated by the perceived emotions triggered by experiences. If a way could be developed to categorize emotions and responses, then it may be possible for the number of negative perceptions experienced to be reduced. As noted in the article by Kassm, et. All (2013), if a general model for emotional responses and neural activation patterns is developed, then individual responses to perceived emotions may have a predictability capacity.
If there are less negative perceptions, then the amount of conflict in society could even be reduced as well. I chose this research methodology because it compares multiple independent variables that contain multiple values and allows for comparison of several measures of the dependent variable. A larger sample size would improve the validity of this study. I think that the value of this study will be significant. Research concerning emotional processes is lacking, and this study can help extend the current knowledge surrounding the subject. Findings have been inconsistent when attempting to understand emotional capacity, and there is little understanding as to why some people lack certain emotions entirely.
References
- Decety, J., & Chaminade, T. (2003). Neural correlates of feeling sympathy. Neuropsychologia, 41, 127–138. https://doi-org.proxy.kennesaw.edu/10.1016/S0028-3932(02)00143-4
- E. Mark Cummings, Dena Vogel, Jennifer S. Cummings, & Mona El-Sheikh. (1989). Children’s Responses to Different Forms of Expression of Anger between Adults. Child Development, (6), 1392. https://doi-org.proxy.kennesaw.edu/10.2307/1130929
- Hockenbury, D. H. & Hockenbury, S. E. (2007). Discovering psychology. New York: Worth Publishers.
- Hodges SD, Wegner DM. Automatic and controlled empathy. In: Ickes W, editor, Empathic accuracy. New York: The Guilford Press; 1997, p. 311–39.
- Kassam, K. S., Markey, A. R., Cherkassky, V. L., Loewenstein, G., & Just, M. A. (2013). Identifying Emotions on the Basis of Neural Activation. Plos One, 8(6), e66032. https://doi-org.proxy.kennesaw.edu/10.1371/journal.pone.0066032
- Maibom, H. L. (n.d.). Feeling for others: Empathy, sympathy, and morality. Inquiry, 52(5), 483– 499. https://doi-org.proxy.kennesaw.edu/10.1080/00201740903302626
- SONNBY-BORGSTRÖM, M., JÖNSSON, P., & SVENSSON, O. (2008). Gender differences in facial imitation and verbally reported emotional contagion from spontaneous to emotionally regulated processing levels. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 49(2), 111–122. https://doi-org.proxy.kennesaw.edu/10.1111/j.1467-9450.2008.00626.x
- Wicker, B., Perrett, D. I., Baron-Cohen, S., & Decety, J. (2003). Being the target of another’s emotion: a PET study. Neuropsychologia, 41, 139–146. https://doiorg.proxy.kennesaw.edu/10.1016/S0028-3932(02)00144-6
- Wispé, L. (1986). The distinction between sympathy and empathy: To call forth a concept, a word is needed. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(2), 314–321. https://doi-org.proxy.kennesaw.edu/10.1037/0022-3514.50.2.314
