This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Look closely at a face in a painting and you might think you know what emotion the person is experiencing. A smile suggests happiness.
A furrowed brow might signal anger. Widened eyes could mean fear or surprise. But what happens when you ask lots of people the same question?
Do they see the same emotion, or something more complicated? In our recent research, we tested how consistently people interpret faces and their emotions depicted in paintings. Emotions are central to how we experience and navigate the world around us.
Because facial expressions are an important way emotions are communicated, psychologists have spent decades studying what faces can tell us about emotional states. One of the main tools for studying emotions has been photographic databases like the classic Pictures of Facial Affect. In these images, actors pose using standardized combinations of facial movements to represent six basic, widely recognized emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise.
These passport photo–type images are valuable for studying how people recognize clear, prototypical emotion expressions. However, expressions do not always fit neatly into one of these six categories. To understand the more nuanced ways people interpret facial expressions, researchers also need examples that go beyond clear-cut expressions.
However, asking someone to pose with a convincing layered emotional expression for a photograph is not straightforward. So researchers have found examples from films or everyday life, while also introducing additional emotion labels and other ways of measuring how a facial expression is understood, such as how positive or negative and how strongly that emotion is felt. I work as part of an international team of psychologists that decided to look at how art could offer an option.
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