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Looking at You or Looking Elsewhere: The Influence of Head Orientation on the Signal Value of Emotional Facial Expressions

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Abstract

The role of horizontal head tilt for the perceptions of emotional facial expressions was examined. For this, a total of 387 participants rated facial expressions of anger, fear, sadness, and happiness, as well as neutral expressions shown by two men and two women in either a direct or an averted face angle. Decoding accuracy, attributions of dominance and affiliation, emotional reactions of the perceivers, and the felt desire to approach the expresser were assessed. Head position was found to strongly influence reactions to anger and fear but less so for other emotions. Direct anger expressions were more accurately decoded, perceived as less affiliative, and elicited higher levels of anxiousness and repulsion, as well as less desire to approach than did averted anger expressions. Conversely, for fear expressions averted faces elicited more negative affect in the perceiver. These findings suggest that horizontal head position is an important cue for the assessment of threat.

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Notes

  1. For fear expressions, inspection of the means showed that many participants rated these faces as expressing both surprise and fear. As this is not unreasonable, given the morphological overlap between the two expressions (raised eyebrows and open mouth) and the fact that surprise and fear do frequently co-occur, such combined ratings were also considered accurate.

  2. As an initial analysis did not reveal a main effect or any interaction involving participant sex this factor was dropped from the analyses reported here.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the Fonds de Formation des Chercheurs et l’Aide à la Recherche to Ursula Hess and Robert E. Kleck and by National Science Foundation Grant 0544533 to Kleck, Hess, and Adams. We are grateful to Martin Beaupré for help with the data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Quebec at Montreal, Station “centre-ville”, P.O. Box 8888, H2C 3P8, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Ursula Hess

  2. Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA

    Reginald B. Adams Jr.

  3. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA

    Robert E. Kleck

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  1. Ursula Hess
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  2. Reginald B. Adams Jr.
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  3. Robert E. Kleck
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Correspondence to Ursula Hess.

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Hess, U., Adams, R.B. & Kleck, R.E. Looking at You or Looking Elsewhere: The Influence of Head Orientation on the Signal Value of Emotional Facial Expressions. Motiv Emot 31, 137–144 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-007-9057-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-007-9057-x

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