An Audience Facilitates Facial Feedback: A Social-Context Hypothesis Reconciling Original Study and Nonreplication

Abstract

Nonreplications of previously undisputed phenomena tend to leave a theoretical vacuum. This theoretical perspective seeks to fill the gap left by the failure to replicate unobtrusive facial feedback. In the emblematic original study, participants who held a pen between the teeth (i.e., requiring activity of the zygomaticus major muscle) rated cartoons more positively than participants who held the pen between the lips. We argue that the same social mechanisms (e.g., the presence of an audience) modulate facial feedback to emotion as are involved in the feed-forward shaping of facial actions by emotions. Differing social contexts could thus help explain the contrast between original findings and failures to obtain unobtrusive facial feedback. An exploratory analysis that included results only from (unobtrusive) facial-feedback studies without explicit reference to emotion in the facial manipulation provided preliminary support for this hypothesis. Studies with a social context (e.g., due to experimenter presence) showed a medium-sized aggregate facial-feedback effect, whereas studies without a social context (e.g., when facial actions were only filmed), revealed a small effect. Video awareness strengthened facial feedback considerably within an engaging social context, but seemed to reduce it without a social context. We provisionally conclude that a (pro-)social interpretation of facial actions facilitates feedback to (primarily positive) emotion, and suggest further research explicitly manipulating this context.