Remote work is surprisingly productive — leading many people to wonder if they’ll ever go back to the office. But why is it so exhausting? Dr. Niedenthal explains why video chat makes it harder to achieve “synchrony,” a sort of unconscious, balletic call-and-response that emerges when two people are in the same room.
Zoom (or Houseparty or Skype) have replaced hours of in-person encounters. But why do they make you feel so awkward and unfulfilled? Psychologists, computer scientists and neuroscientists say the distortions and delays inherent in video communication can end up making you feel isolated, anxious and disconnected (or more than you were already). You might be better off just talking on the phone.
Experts say mirroring another person’s facial expressions is essential not only for recognizing emotion, but also for feeling it. Botox and other cosmetic procedures that alter your face can also flatten your affect and ultimately disrupt your ability to emote, a cause for concern, says Dr. Niedenthal.
“Smile while your heart is breaking, put on a happy face, say cheese. We’re so used to smiling on demand that to do otherwise can seem antisocial. Even going through the motions of a smile, scientists have found, can make us feel happy.” The Wall Street Journal interviewed our own Jared Martin, the first author of a recent paper demonstrating the distinct effects of smiles of reward, affiliation, and dominance on recipients' stress levels. Read the article (behind a paywall) here or email us to request a pdf copy.
When people are being evaluated, their whole body responds. Verbal feedback causes robust activation in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. What about nonverbal evaluative feedback? Recent discoveries about the social functions of facial expression have documented three morphologically distinct smiles, which serve the functions of reinforcement, social smoothing, and social challenge. Jared Martin is the first author on the latest paper from our lab, published in Nature Scientific Reports.
Americans tend to smile more often than people in other countries. It turns out, American smiles signal excitement, confidence, and also have to do with a long history of immigration. The Atlantic features our recent work on historical heterogeneity and reasons for smiling (Rychlowska et al., 2015) is this fun science video on cultural differences in smiling.
The first empirical paper extending our social functional account of smiles to laughter is now available in the journal PLOS ONE (to read it, click here). This study combines acoustic analysis (including pitch, spectral, and formant variables) of 400 laugh samples with perceiver ratings of how much each laugh signals reward, affiliation, and dominance. We draw inspiration from previous research in laughter and animal vocal behavior to explain the rich diversity of sounds people produce while laughing. We also uncovered some unexpected sex effects that warrant further investigation. The abstract is below:
Recent work has identified the physical features of smiles that accomplish three tasks fundamental to human social living: rewarding behavior, establishing and managing affiliative bonds, and negotiating social status. The current work extends the social functional account to laughter. Participants (N = 762) rated the degree to which reward, affiliation, or dominance (between-subjects) was conveyed by 400 laughter samples acquired from a commercial sound effects website. Inclusion of a fourth rating dimension, spontaneity, allowed us to situate the current approach in the context of existing laughter research, which emphasizes the distinction between spontaneous and volitional laughter. We used 11 acoustic properties extracted from the laugh samples to predict participants’ ratings. Actor sex moderated, and sometimes even reversed, the relation between acoustics and participants’ judgments. Spontaneous laughter appears to serve the reward function in the current framework, as similar acoustic properties guided perceiver judgments of spontaneity and reward: reduced voicing and increased pitch, increased duration for female actors, and increased pitch slope, center of gravity, first formant, and noisiness for male actors. Affiliation ratings diverged from reward in their sex-dependent relationship to intensity and, for females, reduced pitch range and raised second formant. Dominance displayed the most distinct pattern of acoustic predictors, including increased pitch range, reduced second formant in females, and decreased pitch variability in males. We relate the current findings to existing findings on laughter and human and non-human vocalizations, concluding laughter can signal much more that felt or faked amusement.
Dr. Niedenthal made an appearance on Wisconsin News 3 to talk about our social functional approach to smiles and why smiles are worth studying.
Olivia (Fangyun) Zhao begins her PhD in Psychology at UW this fall. She will be co-advised by Dr. Bilge Mutlu from Computer Science. As an undergrad at UW majoring in Psychology and Statistics, Olivia worked as a research assistant in both the Niedenthal Emotions Lab and Dr. Mutlu's Human-Computer Interaction Lab. She realized all the ways in which her work in one lab complemented her work in the other, and decided to help bridge the research interests of Dr. Niedenthal and Dr. Mutlu. Her first year project will use cutting-edge measurement technology from CS to examine questions our lab asks about human nonverbal behavior.
Welcome, Olivia!
Our latest empirical article uses a data-driven approach to build prototypical models of smiles that accomplish distinct social tasks: rewarding the self and others (reward), conveying non-threat and maintaining bonds (affiliation), and negotiating social status (dominance). Magdalena Rychlowska, the first author, is a former graduate student of the Niedenthal Emotions Lab and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Queen's University Belfast, working with Will Curran and Gary McKeown. Co-authors Rachael Jack, Philippe Schyns, and Oliver Garrod (University of Glasgow) contributed their reverse-correlation approach for synthesizing models of facial expressions using perceiver responses.
Check out the article in Psychological Science here and the press release here.
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The facial action units that emerged as indicative of reward, affiliation, and dominance, based on perceiver ratings.
