E-motions

Abstract

An experiment is presented, aimed at preliminary testing the hypothesis according to which facial expressions related to specific emotions, such as anger, fear, and joy, incorporate a sense of dynamicity and are used to enhance the representation of motion in static artworks. Since a growing body of evidence shows that motion is one of the core components of emotion, and the representation of motion in art is often achieved by portraying unstable poses, we hypothesize that the visually more dynamic emotions are those with ‘unstable’ facial expressions, i.e., expressions that imply muscular tensions that cannot be held for long (e.g., rage, grief, amazement: E-motions) whereas static emotions are those which can last and even represent a constant facial feature in some people. To test this hypothesis we chose eleven static artworks from which we derived twelve human figures that convey different emotions in different proportions. Images were manipulated to produce two sets of stimuli: headless bodies (Set 1) and bodiless heads (Set 2). Participants were asked to rate perceived dynamicity of stimuli from Set 1 on a 7-point Likert scale (Session 1) and to rate each stimulus from Set 2 for joy, sadness, surprise, disgust, anger, fear, serenity, puzzlement and dynamicity (i.e., eight emotions and dynamicity). As expected, we found that some facial emotions (i.e., disgust, anger and fear) are positively related to the dynamicity attributed to the artworks: those emotions are the more sudden ones and thus the more ‘unstable’. We also found that serenity is negatively related to dynamicity. Contrary to our expectations, we found instead that joy is statistically different from dynamicity, a result that calls for further investigation.