Emotion science in context

PS103
Week 3

Sebastian Korb
Outline
• Effects of Botox on emotional experience and emotion perception
• Emotion recognition
• Depression
• Emotion x sex interact
• in perception of faces and voices
• Do women look sadder with the hijab?
 Botox
effects on felt and perceived emotions
Depression
 Reality TV show, started 2010, now in
its 27th series, plays in Brentwood, Essex

"real people in modified situations,

saying unscripted lines but in a
structured way”

There is a lot of bling bling, talk about the looks, the cars, the
money, relationships, etc. ….
 The Botox pandemic
• An estimated 900,000 facial injections
of Botox are carried out every year in
Britain (The Guardian)
• Facial Botox injections are the most
sought after cosmetic procedure, and
demand is rising (fillers)

(Oct 2020)
 Botox
• Trade name for Botulinum toxin
• neurotoxic protein
• produced by the
bacterium Clostridium botulinum
• MOST POTENT KNOWN TOXIN !!
• Lethal dose: 1 nanogram per kg
• 1 gram can kill 1 million people (if evenly
dispersed and/or inhaled)
 Botulinum toxin
• First described by the German physican
Justinus Kerner
• early 1800s: made the link between botulism and
food poisoning by spoiled sausages
• Botulus means sausage in Latin
• Causes botulism, i.e. neuroparalysis
• difficulty swallowing, vomiting, severe muscle
weakness, drooping eyelids, slurred speech …
• respiratory and cardiac failure
Justinus Kerner
Botox stops the release of Acetylcholine,
the neurotransmitter necessary for muscle contraction

As a result, muscle contraction is reduced or the muscle is paralysed entirely

(lasts 3-6 months); muscle atrophy occurs on the long run
 Botox, the miracle poison
• the first biological toxin which is licensed for treatment of human “diseases”

Strabismus (1989, FDA)

wrinkle removal (2022, FDA)

Chronic migraine (2010, FDA)

Excessive sweating (2004, FDA) Reduce spasticity, e.g. after a stroke (2019, FDA)
Wrinkle removal with Botox
What are the possible side effects of facial botox?

It messes with facial feedback

The facial feedback hypothesis
§ Facial expressions not only
communicate our emotions, but can
also influence them
§ The activation of facial muscles sends
(feedback) signals to the brain

Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson (1993). Curr Dirs in Psych Science

14
Proprioceptive feedback
• The brain receives information about the state of muscle contractions
• This PROPRIOCEPTION is fundamental for fine motor control
• Typical proprioceptive organs are muscle spindles and Golgi tendon organs,
they detect muscle/tendon stretch
• These do not exist in the face, so the mechanism for proprioceptive
feedback from the face remains somewhat unclear
The facial feedback hypothesis
§ Facial expressions not only
communicate our emotions, but can
also influence them
§ The activation of facial muscles sends
(feedback) signals to the brain
§ Facial feedback helps understanding
other people’s emotions

Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson (1993). Curr Dirs in Psych Science

16
 Feedback due to Facial mimicry
§ People tend to imitate the facial expressions seen in others
§ This mimicry causes changes in muscle activations … and in facial feedback
§ Spontaneous facial mimicry is unconscious and of small amplitude

Dimberg et al. (2002)

 Sensorimotor
simulation
What’s up with this
guy?

time

Oh my God I’m
smiling

This guy must be happy,

maybe he won at the lottery?
Blocking facial mimicry hinders emotion recognition

• People tend to imitate the facial expressions seen in others (facial

mimicry)
• This causes changes in muscle activations … and in facial feedback
• Messing with this process…

• Slows down the recognition of facial expressions (Baumeister et al.,

2016; Stel & van Knippenberg, 2008)

• Interferes with the recognition of happiness (Oberman, Winkielman, &

Ramachandran, 2007)

• Impairs the distinction between true and false smiles (Maringer,

Krumhuber, Fischer, & Niedenthal, 2011; Rychlowska et al., 2014)

• Delays the perception of change between happy and sad facial

expressions (Niedenthal, Brauer, Halberstadt, & Innes-Ker, 2001)
• Increases threshold to perceive happiness in anger-to-happiness
morphs (Marjolejo-Ramos et al., 2020)
• Decreases responses to angry faces in the amygdala (Hennenlotter et
al., 2009)
Where in the brain is facial feedback processed?
Lesions of somatosensory cortex impair emotion recognition
A Role for Somatosensory Cortices in the Visual Recognition of
Emotion as Revealed by Three-Dimensional Lesion Mapping
Ralph Adolphs,1 Hanna Damasio,1,2 Daniel Tranel,1 Greg Cooper,1 and Antonio R. Damasio1,2
1Department of Neurology, Division of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Iowa College of Medicine, Iowa City, Iowa
52242, and 2The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California
Although lesion and functional imaging studies have broadly
implicated the right hemisphere in the recognition of emotion,
neither the underlying processes nor the precise anatomical
correlates are well understood. We addressed these two issues
in a quantitative study of 108 subjects with focal brain lesions,
using three different tasks that assessed the recognition and
naming of six basic emotions from facial expressions. Lesions
were analyzed as a function of task performance by coregis-
tration in a common brain space, and statistical analyses of
their joint volumetric density revealed specific regions in which
damage was significantly associated with impairment. We
show that recognizing emotions from visually presented facial
expressions requires right somatosensory-related cortices. The
How do we judge the emotion that another person is feeling? This
question has been investigated in some detail using a class of
stimuli that is critical for social communication and that contrib-
utes significantly to our representation of other persons: human
facial expressions (Darwin, 1872; Ekman, 1973; Fridlund, 1994;
Russell and Fernandez-Dols, 1997; Cole, 1998). Recognition of
facial expressions of emotion has been shown to involve subcor-
tical structures such as the amygdala (Adolphs et al., 1994; Morris
et al., 1996; Young et al., 1995), as well as the neocortex in the
right hemisphere (Bowers et al., 1985; Gur et al., 1994; Adolphs
The Journal of Neuroscience, April 1, 2000, 20(7):2683–2690
• Emotion recognition in faces tested in
findings are consistent with the idea that we recognize another
>100 patients
individual’s emotional state by internally generating somato-
sensory representations that simulate how the other individual
would feel when displaying a certain facial expression.
• Lesions of right somatosensory cortices
Follow-up experiments revealed that conceptual knowledge
and knowledge of the name of the emotion draw on neuroana-
related to poorer performance
tomically separable systems. Right somatosensory-related cor-
tices thus constitute an additional critical component that func-
tions together with structures such as the amygdala and right
• (right) somatosensory cortices play a role
visual cortices in retrieving socially relevant information from
faces.
in emotion recognition
Key words: emotion; simulation; somatosensory; somatic;
empathy; faces; social; human
• Possible mechanism: facial feedback
of visually related right hemisphere cortices in the recognition of
facial emotion, but it is unclear how high-level visual processing
accompanying facial mimicry cannot be
in such regions ultimately permits retrieval of knowledge regard-
ing the emotion shown in the stimuli. We suggested previously
processed anymore
that both visual and somatosensory-related regions in the right
hemisphere might be important to recognize facial emotion, but
the sample size of that study (Adolphs et al., 1996) was too small
to permit any statistical analyses or to draw conclusions about
more restricted cortical regions. Furthermore, neither our previ-
ous study (Adolphs et al., 1996) nor, to our knowledge, any other
“Virtual” lesions of somatosensory cortex do the same

Sensory cortices and processing social face signals 3509

Fig. 1. (A) The six face categories used in our TMS experiment. (B) The procedure used showing the sequence of events within a trial.
 sample and target faces. The six expressions
were presented an equal number of times.
For the identity discrimination task, half the Figure 1. The normalized location of the rOFA and the face region of the rSC in one subject.
trials showed pairs with the same identity and
half showed pairs with different identities. Ex-
pression always changed between the sample
and target faces. The six models were presented
an equal number of times.
TMS stimulation and site localization. TMS
was delivered at 10 Hz and 60% of maximal
stimulator output, using a Magstim Super
Rapid Stimulator and a 70 mm figure-of-eight
coil, with the coil handle pointing upward and
parallel to the midline. A single intensity was
used on the basis of previous studies (O’Shea et
al., 2004; Pitcher et al., 2007), and, for ease of
comparison with related studies, the majority of
which have used a single intensity. Because we
used within-site task controls, any task-specific
effects could not be explained by induced TMS
intensity differences within participants.
SC Inhibition of: In blocks with TMS during experiment 1 and
experiment 2, test stimuli were presented dur-

• right somatosensory cortex (face area)

ing 500 ms rTMS with rTMS onset concurrent
with the onset of the target visual stimulus.
During experiment 3, double-pulse TMS
OFA • right OFA (dTMS) with 40 ms between pulses (O’Shea et
al., 2004; Pitcher et al., 2007) was delivered at
seven different times from stimulus onset: 20 –
60, 60 –100, 100 –140, 130 –170, 170 –210, 210 –
250, and 250 –290 ms, chosen to cover the most likely times of rOFA and
rSC involvement (Pourtois et al., 2004; Pitcher et al., 2007).
Each participant’s MRI structural scan was normalized against a stan-
dard template, and each transformation (FSL software; Oxford Univer-
sity Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain) was used to convert the
appropriate Talairach coordinates to the untransformed (structural)
space coordinates, yielding subject-specific localization of the sites (Fig.
1) (supplemental Fig. 1, available at www.jneurosci.org as supplemental
material). The Talairach coordinates for rOFA (38,"80,"7) were the
average from 11 neurologically normal participants in an fMRI face pro-
cessing study (Rossion et al., 2003), and coordinates for the face region of
rSC (44,"12,48) were the average from 12 neurologically normal partic-
ipants in an fMRI study of facial expression (Winston et al., 2003). The
Talairach coordinates for the finger region of rSC (47,"30,62) were the
average for six neurologically normal participants in an fMRI cortical
mapping study (Huang and Sereno, 2007). The vertex was defined as a
point midway between the inion and the nasion and equidistant from the
Figure 2. Timeline of the trial procedure for experiments 1–3.
left and right intertragal notches. Using these coordinates, TMS sites
were located using the Brainsight TMS–MRI coregistration system
(Rogue Research).
Procedure. Experiment 1 delivered rTMS to rOFA, the face region of
rSC, and vertex during the behavioral tasks. The vertex condition served
as a control for nonspecific effects of TMS. A no-TMS condition was
included as a behavioral baseline. The identity component acted as a
control task based on the results of a pilot experiment (supplemental
Figs. 2, 3, available at www.jneurosci.org as supplemental material).
Figure 2 displays the trial procedure. Participants sat 57 cm from the
monitor with their heads stabilized in a chin rest and indicated by a
right-hand key press whether the prime face showed the same facial
expression as the target face (expression task) or the same person as the
target face (identity task). They were instructed to respond as accurately
and quickly as possible.
Four blocks of 72 trials were presented for each task (expression and
identity), and task order was balanced between participants. During each
Summary facial feedback and emotion perception

• People tend to imitate others’ emotional expressions – facial mimicry

• Changes in facial muscle activity are captured – proprioception
• And processed in somatosensory cortices – facial feedback
• Interfering with facial mimicry, e.g. by preventing smiling with a pen
between the lips, makes people slightly less good at recognising
others’ facial emotional expressions
• Lesions in the somatosensory cortex – real ones e.g. due to stroke, or
virtual ones due to TMS – also make you slightly worse and/or slower
at recognising facial emotional expressions
• But what are the specific effects of Botox on emotion recognition?
 tox ;
1 6 bo
N = tylane
5 re s
1

Botox: glabellar lines,

forehead, crows feet
Restylane (filler): glabellar
lines, nanasolabial folds
 o to x;
10 b
N= t ro l
n
11 co
(2019)

tro ls
2 co n
1 2 ; 1
N=
Summary Botox & emotion recognition
• At least 3 published articles reported people being slower and/or less
good at recognising (subtle) emotional facial expressions, especially
those involving the brow area
• 1 study also found that weakly emotional sentences were rated to be
less emotional after Botox
• Criticism:
• Small sample sizes (10-16 people x group)
• Control group often receives no treatment at all
• If control receives filler injections, then not always into the same region of the
face (e.g. nasolabial folds vs. eyebrows)
The facial feedback hypothesis
§ Facial expressions not only
communicate our emotions, but can
also influence them
§ The activation of facial muscles sends
(feedback) signals to the brain
§ Facial feedback helps understanding
other people’s emotions
§ Facial feedback influences our
emotional feelings

Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson (1993). Curr Dirs in Psych Science

29
 The Expression of the
An old idea?
Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872)
What is Emotion? (1884)
Charles Darwin

William James

“Refuse to express a passion, and

“The free expression by outward it dies”
signs of an emotion intensifies it . . .
the repression, as far as this is On Emotions: A Psycho-
possible, of all outward signs softens Physiological Study (1885)
Carl Georg Lange
our emotions”
Smiling increases feelings of humour (or not?)
“Data from 3,878 hypothesis-unaware
participants from 19 countries indicated
that a facial mimicry and voluntary facial
action task could both amplify and initiate
feelings of happiness.”
Summary facial feedback and emotional experience

• The idea that posing an emotional expression generates or

accentuates emotional feelings goes back to Darwin and the James-
Lange theory
• But scientific evidence is mixed
• What are the specific effects of Botox on emotional experience?
 tox ;
3 3 bo
N = tylane
5 re s
3

Negative (Gross)

Mildly positive

Results: Botox leads to general decrease in

magnitude of emotional experience, especially Positive (Funny)
in response to mildly positive videos
 Botox as a cure for depression?
• Botox injections into the glabellar region
suppress frowning
• This has been suggested as a “cure” for
depression
2013

Eric Finzi, MD

Suggested mechanism:
↓ frowning, ↓ negative facial feedback, ↓ negative mood, ↓ depression
Several studies have investigated the effects of Botox injections into the
glabellar region on depression symptoms in clinically depressed individuals

A recent meta-analysis (of 5 clinical

trials) concluded that Botox is effective
in the treatment of depression, and
should be used in psychiatry

Eric Finzi, MD
• most research was conducted by investigators with conflicts of interest (e.g.
Finzi)
• the effect of Botox on depression is suspiciously huge (d > 0.80)
• 2 x established antidepressant treatments
• > 4 x typical facial feedback effects
• likely problems with research design, proposed mechanism of action,
and/or the analysis or reporting of the data
 Conclusions
• Botox has quite literally changed the face of
humanity
• Initial evidence suggests that Botox does affect
emotion recognition, but this is based on small
sample sizes, and sometimes suboptimal control
conditions
• Evidence that Botox changes felt emotions is also
weak or anecdotal
• Thus, there is insufficient evidence to say that
Botox improves our mood and is a “cure” for
depression
• Many of TOWIE’s characters declared suffering from
depression
 Conclusions
• If Botox does affect emotion and emotion
perception, the underlying mechanism might
not be facial feedback
• improved subjective appearance, quality of life,
and social treatment
• More (properly-conducted and independent)
research is needed to find out both the size of
the effect and the underlying mechanism
• Besides effects on emotion (perception), Botox
can have some serious consequences
• -> always consult a properly trained person!
Do men and women differ in how they
express emotions?
 Invariant Variant
Identity
Age
Emotion
Sex
Ethnicity Focus of attention

Attractiveness
Intentions
Trustworthiness
Speech
Health
 Cognitive and neural models of face processing
Bruce & Young (1986) – A cognitive model of face perception Haxby et al. (2000) – a neural model of face perception

Superior
Temporal
Sulcus
(STS)

Occipital
face area
(OFA)

Fusiform
face area
(FFA)

43
 happy

emotion
sex
female male

angry
 happy

em
female

ot
ion
sex
male

angry
 Emotion X Sex

• When asked to imagine an angry/happy face, people think of a

man/woman (Becker et al., 2007)
• Faster and more accurate categorisation (Becker et al., 2007)
• Of anger in males and happiness in females
• Of maleness in angry faces femaleness in happy faces

Becker et al., (2007); see also Aguado et al. 2009

46
• androginous avatar face with different levels of anger, happiness, fear
• rate (7-point VAS) „how much does this person look like a man or a woman?“

Likelihood to be a woman
• N = 126
• 8 faces (4 M, 4 F) from NimStim database
• 9 levels of emotion (happy – angry)
• Task: emotion categorisation

48
• Pre-registered replication, with same stimuli and task
• N = 108

Korb & Massaccesi (2020). PsyArXiv, doi: 10.31234/osf.io/uyvm6

49
Female politicians express less anger and more happiness in
face and voice, compared to male politicians

• Angela Merkel expressed less anger than her male opponents

• voters rewarded Merkel’s expression of happiness and punished her facial displays of anger

Boussalis et al. (2021). Am Pol Sci Rev

 happy

em
female

ot
ion
sex
male
Implicit effects:
• emotion > sex?
• sex > emotion?
angry
 Why should we care?

• The rapid detection and understanding of the intentions of unfamiliar others is/was crucial
for survival and for successfully navigating society
• imagine someone approaching you with an angry expression, suggesting they might
attack you!
• Therefore, emotional expressions are likely to be registered even unconsciously, and to
influence our judgments also when we are not paying attention (e.g. when the task requires
us to determine the person’s sex/gender)
• Recognition pf sex/gender is also important, of course, but likely does not need to occur
quite as rapidly, nor when we are not interested in this feature
 Face stimuli
Available at:
https://osf.io/nmykg/?view_only=1e8ff74bd1f84674847c8b744aa9a9dd

• 1 male and 1 female avatar faces created

with FaceGen Modeler 3.5.3 (Singular
Inversions Inc.).
• Emotional changes (happy to angry) in
FacsGen based on the Facial Action
Coding System (FACS)
• 11 morphs between the male and female
face for each of the 11 emotion levels
• B&W, equalized luminance.

Korb et al. (2022). Emotion

 Experiment 1: Face ratings
• Online, between-subjects design
• N = 76 (N = 35 Emotion; N = 41 Sex)

Happy/Male Angry/Female
Korb et al. (2022). Emotion
Experiment 1: Face ratings

Korb et al. (2022). Emotion

 Experiment 1: Face ratings

Emotion > Sex

NO Task X Explicit Task X Implicit:

F(1, 107.2) = 0.01, p = .93, ns F(1, 94.76) = 24.65, p < .001

LMM:
Rating ~ Task * Explicit * Implicit +
( Explicit * Implicit | subject)
Korb et al. (2022). Emotion
 Experiment 2: Face categorisation
• N = 108
• Pre-registered, laboratory, within-subjs

Happy/Male Angry/Female

Korb et al. (2022). Emotion

Experiment 2: Face categorisation
Categorisation choices

Korb et al. (2022). Emotion

 Experiment 2: Face categorisation

Emotion > Sex

GLMM:
Choice ~ Task * Explicit * Task X Explicit Task X Implicit:
Implicit + ( Task * Explicit * z = -5.22, p < .001 z = 5.20, p < .001
Implicit | subject)

Korb et al. (2022). Emotion

121 voice stimuli varying in emotion and sex
 Experiment 3: Voice ratings
• Pre-registered, online, within-subjects design
• N = 72

Happy/Male Angry/Female

Korb et al. (2022). Emotion

Experiment 3: Voice ratings

Korb et al. (2022). Emotion

 Experiment 3: Voice ratings

Emotion > Sex

LMM: Task X Explicit Task X Implicit:

Rating ~ Task * Explicit * Implicit F(1, 72) = 4.08, p = .047 F(1, 72.1) = 56.20, p < .001
+ ( Explicit * Implicit | subject)

Korb et al. (2022). Emotion

Summary

• Rating and categorisation of faces and voices show:

• happy-female vs. angry-male association
• emotion > sex (Implicit level, i.e. when task irrelevant)

6
 Causes of emotion x sex interaction
• Face morphology
• trait impressions are influenced by the resemblance of a person’s permanent facial structure to an emotional
expression
• Specific categories of emotion and sex may overlap at the physical level
• Men vs. women
• larger, heavier brows - makes them look drawn down
• more angular jaw and thinner lips - makes mouth look compressed
• larger noses - makes nostrils look flared
• these features also characterise anger expressions
• centre of the brow drawn down strongly, often producing vertical furrows between the eyes
• compressed mouth
• flared nostrils
• participants judged emotionally neutral faces on a set of trait dimensions
• Neutral face images submitted to a Bayesian network classifier trained to detect
emotional expressions
• Findings:
• neutral faces that are perceived to have positive valence resemble happiness
• faces that are perceived to have negative valence resemble disgust and fear
• faces that are perceived to be threatening resemble anger
• neutral expression male faces objectively resemble angry expressions more than female faces do
• neutral female faces objectively resemble surprise expressions more than male faces do

Zebrowitz et al. (2010). J of Pers and Soc Psych

 n era l
i n ge
Male faces show greater
re s s ive
activation of AU4 (brow
r e e x p
lowerer) in anger
e s m o i t i es
a l e fa c i m i l a r
d s m si ca l s
Us f i n o p h y
i s o f A d u e t
n a l ys t i re l y )
AI’s a t ( en
i o n o
n his stimu l u s s et)

so cia t ( in t
s e x a s
t i o n -
Em o
but also more AU12 (lip
corner puller) in happiness

69
 Causes of emotion x sex interaction
• Face morphology
• Gender stereotypes
• We might have internalised stereotypical ideas about how men and women
ought to experience and express different types of emotions
• men thought of dominant and assertive, which goes with anger
• women thought of caring, submissive, which goes with smiling and sadness
• Created blended expressions of anger and sadness
• Manipulated gender of poser with hair and clothing
• Expression perceived as
• more anger and less sadness if looking more male
• more sadness and less anger if looking more female

• infant’s ambiguous anger/sadness expression

• Shown to expectant parents
• high-stereotyped men interpreted the expression in
a stereotype-consistent manner
• anger if infant described as a boy
• sadness if infant described as a girl
 Outstanding questions
§ What is driving the emotion x sex interaction?
- Face morphology? Cultural stereotypes?
§ Does it differ between cultures?
§ At what age (of the perceiver and/or expressor)
does it appear?
§ Are some types of smiles/laughter associated with
femaleness more than others?
Religious/cultural markers
Effects on emotion perception
• prejudice about Islamic head-dresses is common in Western societies
• more fear and less happiness perceived in faces of women wearing the niqab (Kret, de Gelder, 2012)
• More sadness and less happiness perceived for Islamic head-dress vs cap and shawl (Kret & Fischer, 2018) :
• General cultural in-group advantage for facial emotion recognition (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002)
• Q1: Does emotion recognition accuracy, especially when measured implicitly, relate to explicitly self-
reported attitude towards the hijab?
• Q2: how does the hijab impact facial emotion recognition in a predominantly Islamic country?
• N = 141 (71 Austria, 70 Turkey)
• groups similar in age, gender distribution, level of education, and type of
studies
• Stimuli: 8 faces (NimStim database)
• 2 emotions: happy/sad with 5 intensities
• 2 covers: Hijab/Oval mask
• The same hijab/mask was used for all faces
My attitude toward women who wear the Islamic headdress (hijab) is one of
Table 1: Demographic characteristics of the Austrian and Turkish samples (unknown religion
corresponds to participants’ choice not to indicate their religious belief): 1.Acceptance
Austrian sample Turkish sample 2.Admiration
N 71 70 3.Affection
N females 43 57 4.Antipathy
Age range 20-35 19-35 5.Approval
Age mean (SD) 25.96 (3.98) 22.76 (3.30) 6.Contempt
7.Disapproval
Austria (40), Germany (19), Bosnia (1),
Nationality Colombia (1), Poland (1), Romania (2), Turkey (70) 8.Hostility
Russia (1), Slovakia (1), Ukraine (3) 9.Sympathy
Christian (35), atheist (1), Muslim (3), Muslim (51), Agnostic (1), Deist (1),
Religion
other (1), unknown (31) unknown (17)
In my opinion, women wearing an Islamic headdress (hijab) are generally
10.Warm

Korb et al. (2021). QJEP

• Emotion categorisation with
mousetracker task
• 3 task DVs:
• Accuracy
• RT
• area under curve (AU) of mouse path

Korb et al. (2021). QJEP

• Attitude towards the Hijab: similar distribution and identical median in the Austrian and
Turkish samples
Korb et al. (2021). QJEP
Accuracy

• more negative attitude towards the hijab =

more errors for happy than sad faces
• Splitting by country: only significant
in Austrian sample

Korb et al. (2021). QJEP

Area under curve (AUC)
in correct trials
• more negative attitude towards the hijab =
larger AUC for happy than sad faces
• Especially at low-intensity emotion
• Splitting by country: only significant
in Austrian sample

Korb et al. (2021). QJEP

Reaction Time (RT)
in correct trials
• more negative attitude towards the hijab =
slower RT for happy than sad faces
• Splitting by country: only significant
in Austrian sample

Korb et al. (2021). QJEP

Hijab vs. Oval mask

• more categorisation errors

• greater AUC
• slower RT
• Especially for low emotion intensity
Summary hijab study
§ A bias to perceive sadness in (mildly) happy female faces with the hijab was found in both
countries
§ Same distribution of explicit attitude towards the hijab in Austria and Turkey
§ But only in Austria explicit attitude predicted emotion recognition bias
§ Similar religious and political views in both countries?
• participants were young university students living in the capital

§ But less sincere report of explicit attitudes towards the hijab?

• Turkey is a ‘tight’ culture, with more and stronger norms, from which deviance is less tolerated (Gelfand et al., 2011).

§ Future studies should

• Track also the general religious and political views (besides attitude towards the hijab)
• Collect data from participants who are living in a less international and academic environment

82
Overall summary
• The facial feedback hypothesis (FFH) claims that our facial expressions can
generate/modulate our emotional feelings, as well as influence the emotions
we perceive in others
• This has been tested mainly by blocking facial muscles, or interfering with the
proprioceptive facial feedback
• Botox offers an interesting scenario to test the FFH, as it induces transient
(partial) paralysis of facial muscles
• So far, the evidence is mixed, and we cannot conclude that Botox “cures”
depression
• Our interpretation and recognition of others’ facial expressions also depends
on other factors, such as
• Their sex/gender
• Religious/cultural cues