Facial Expressions

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Facial expression implies the revelations about the features and characteristics of a person who has this expression. A person’s facial expression tells about something internal in the expresser’s character or thoughts. Speaking about facial expression in the context of асу communication and non-verbal communication it is suffice to mention that facial expression usually implies a change of a visual pattern. The same way as the static painting can express someone’s mood or capture a definite sentiment, a person’s face can also express relatively static features and characteristics. Sometimes, this is called physiognomy. Thus, the concept of facial expression includes the following components:

·        some features and characteristics of a person who is represented or, in other words, signified;

·        a visual configuration that is the representation of this feature or characteristic, in other words, it is the signifier;

·        the sigh vehicle, in other words, the physical basis of the given appearance, such as muscle movements, skin movements, wrinkles, fat, blemishes, lines;

·        some other person, who is a perceiver and usually interprets all the signs.

These relations between the major components of the concept of facial expression are not yet studied completely. Its existence, relations among them, their dependence and interdependence are widely studied by many psychological and behavioral studies.

The study of human facial expressions has many aspects. The social aspect and people’s facial expressions in this sphere are the object of study in many researches. Facial expressions are very important in social relations. Thus, the investigations of information-processing biases using facial stimuli are of great importance either. Schematic faces for emotional expressions can be used in order to investigate the interpretations of different facial expressions and various specific facial features of different individuals who possess high and low social anxiety (Coles, Heimberg, & Schofield, 2008). In order to examine the role of social anxiety in processing such as interpretation or decoding of a facial expression of a definite person, a lot of various tasks can be applied. Thus, individuals with a high level of social anxiety that differ from the others may perceive the facial expressions of other people as more negative or less pleasant than personalities with low level of anxiety do in the same situation. Besides, numerous researches has also shown people’s level of anxiety in their features can be easily traced through the movements of their eyes, which appeared to be more frequent than those of people with low level of anxiety. Thus, eye movements can be closely connected with social phobias viewed at the people with high anxiety level. Thus, people with social phobias demonstrated the inclination to avoid the eye region but at the same time to hyper scan the dace of their interlocutor. Thus, people who have the elevated level of social anxiety have a rather different way of evaluating emotional facial expressions. Besides, these biases appeared to be particularly salient for negative and threatening facial expressions.

The results of some other studies have also demonstrated that ‘facial expression representations of emotion allow one to infer information about all components of the emotion process’ (Schreder and Grandjean, 2008). In order to compare the for modalities, special predictions were developed. These predictions relate to the expected relative performance levels of judges in comparison with emotion and message conditions.  The categorical emotional judgment was considered t be more accurate. It I explained by the fact that emotional construct integrates and subsumes the underlying component processes.

These researches were made to examine people with high level of social anxiety, social phobias and definite biases and the way how their facial expressions and emotions can be interpreted in this respect. It is already known that people who have the elevated level of social anxiety prone to have specific biases and superstitions in the respect how other people treat their facial expression. On the other hand only people with the high level of anxiety can easily tell that the person is angry or offended (i.e. negative attitude) even if a person only frowns, while people with the low level of social anxiety are definitely not capable of this.

On the basis if of the fact that emotion words are overarching, synthetic categories consist of several components. In this respect facial expressions of individuals are the source of inferring these components, either in a direct way, or according to the so-called pars-pro-toto principle, and integrative emotional category as well. The best way to recognize the integrative emotional category is to recognize it in integrating evidence from different components. In fact, the inference of these components is more or less accurate for the expressions that are produced in order to create discrete emotions that depend on specific components of various emotions. As it was expected before the results of the research, it became evident that this is highest for appraisal in emotions differentiating and it is also the lowest for messages or action tendencies that can be several for a given emotion.