Emotion elicitation using facial expression images: A perspective from research on facial expression recognition and person perception

Abstract

When people see a facial expression displayed by another individual, they experience changes in multiple components of emotion, such as appraisals, action tendencies, physiological and motor responses, and subjective feelings. Facial expressions can thus be regarded as emotion-eliciting stimuli. It has often been assumed that the kind of emotion evoked by a certain facial expression is the same as the one conveyed by that facial expression: e.g., a facial expression of happiness is thought to induce happiness in its perceiver. However, such “emotion assimilation” does not always occur, and observing the same facial expression can give rise to different emotions under different conditions. This complexity stems from the facts that the processing of facial expressions is a type of person perception, and that person perception in general is subject to modulation by various factors related to the perceiver, the target (facial expression), the perceiver×target interaction, and the context. Researchers have to take into account this variability when predicting and discussing outcomes of emotion induction by exposure to facial expressions.