Contemporaryapproaches highlight the dynamic nature of emotions, suggesting that emotionalexperiences emerge as a result of interaction between multiple components andcontinuously change over time. Accordingly, a growing research effort is invested in understanding thetemporal dynamics of emotional experiences and their constituent components. Inthis talk I will present recent studies from our lab in which we investigatedthe intra- and the inter-personal dynamics of one of the core emotion responsesystems – i.e. facial activity.
To conduct asystematic investigation of facial dynamics during complex emotionalexperiences, we recorded continuous electromyography (EMG) measures inparticipants who viewed emotional movies. We found that moment-to-momentchanges in facial activity reliably reflected the unfolding of emotionalexperience and tracked with subjective ratings. We also uncovered essentialtemporal differences in the response characteristics of different facialmeasures. In the second study we examined interpersonal EMG dynamics, strivingto understand the role of facial dynamics in communicating emotions. For thataim we recorded facial EMG in participants who co-viewed emotional movies andexamined its interpersonal dynamics. We found that co-present participantsbecome robustly synchronized in their facial responses and this synchronypredicts emotional convergence and affiliative feelings, in particular duringthe positive emotional experience. Finally, we examined the social role of facialsynchrony in a direct social interaction, involving a disclosure of painfulautobiographical event, and found that synchrony in positive facial signals playsa profound regulatory role both for the discloser and for the listener.
Taken together,these findings speak to the importance of dynamic approach to emotion research,which allows for studying the intra- and the inter-personal processes involvedin emergence, communication and regulation of emotional experiences.