Positive emotions in early life and longevity: findings from the nun study.

Handwritten autobiographies from 180 Catholic nuns, composed when participants were a mean age of 22 years, were scored for emotional content and related to survival during ages 75 to 95. A strong inverse association was found between positive emotional content in these writings and risk of mortality in late life (p < .001). As the quartile ranking of positive emotion in early life increased, there was a stepwise decrease in risk of mortality resulting in a 2.5-fold difference between the lowest and highest quartiles. Positive emotional content in early-life autobiographies was strongly associated with longevity 6 decades later. Underlying mechanisms of balanced emotional states are discussed.

Behavioral markers and recognizability of the smile of enjoyment.

Ekman and Friesen (1982) predicted that smiles that express enjoyment would be marked by smoother zygomatic major actions of more consistent duration than the zygomatic major actions of nonenjoyment smiles. Study 1 measured the duration and smoothness of smiles shown by female subjects in response to positive emotion films while alone and in a social interaction. Enjoyment smiles in both situations were of more consistent duration and smoother than nonenjoyment smiles. In Study 2 observers who were shown videotapes of enjoyment and nonenjoyment smiles were able to accurately identify enjoyment smiles at rates greater than chance; moreover, accuracy was positively related to increased salience of orbicularis oculi action. In Study 3, another group of observers were asked to record their impressions of the smiling women shown in Study 2. These women were seen as more positive when they showed enjoyment compared with nonenjoyment smiles. These results provide further evidence that enjoyment smiles are entities distinct from smiles in general.

Emotion and autonomic nervous system activity in the Minangkabau of west Sumatra.

Physiology and emotional experience were studied in the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, a matrilineal, Moslem, agrarian culture with strong proscriptions against public displays of negative emotion. Forty-six Minangkabau men were instructed to contract facial muscles into prototypical configurations of 5 emotions. In comparison with a group of 62 Ss from the United States, cross-cultural consistencies were found in (a) autonomic nervous system (ANS) differences between emotions and (b) high configuration quality being associated with increased ANS differentiation and increased report of emotional experience. These findings provide the first evidence that these patterns of emotion-specific ANS activity and the capacity of voluntary facial action to generate this activity are not unique to American culture.

Emotion, physiology, and expression in old age.

Emotion-specific autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity was studied in 20 elderly people (age 71-83 years, M = 77) who followed muscle-by-muscle instructions for constructing facial prototypes of emotional expressions and relived past emotional experiences. Results indicated that (a) patterns of emotion-specific ANS activity produced by these tasks closely resembled those found in other studies with younger Ss, (b) the magnitude of change in ANS measures was smaller in older than in younger Ss, (c) patterns of emotion-specific ANS activity showed generality across the 2 modes of elicitation, (d) emotion self-reports and spontaneous production of emotional facial expressions that occurred during relived emotional memories were comparable with those found in younger Ss, (e) elderly men and women did not differ in emotional physiology or facial expression, and (f) elderly women reported experiencing more intense emotions when reliving emotional memories than did elderly men.

Voluntary facial action generates emotion-specific autonomic nervous system activity.

Four experiments were conducted to determine whether voluntarily produced emotional facial configurations are associated with differentiated patterns of autonomic activity, and if so, how this might be mediated. Subjects received muscle-by-muscle instructions and coaching to produce facial configurations for anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise while heart rate, skin conductance, finger temperature, and somatic activity were monitored. Results indicated that voluntary facial activity produced significant levels of subjective experience of the associated emotion, and that autonomic distinctions among emotions: (a) were found both between negative and positive emotions and among negative emotions, (b) were consistent between group and individual subjects' data, (c) were found in both male and female subjects, (d) were found in both specialized (actors, scientists) and nonspecialized populations, (e) were stronger when the voluntary facial configurations most closely resembled actual emotional expressions, and (f) were stronger when experience of the associated emotion was reported. The capacity of voluntary facial activity to generate emotion-specific autonomic activity: (a) did not require subjects to see facial expressions (either in a mirror or on an experimenter's face), and (b) could not be explained by differences in the difficulty of making the expressions or by differences in concomitant somatic activity.

Type A behavior pattern: facial behavior and speech components.

Early descriptions of the Type A coronary-prone pattern include both nonverbal and motoric signs. Facial behaviors during the Type A Structured Interview of 24 Type A and 24 Type B men were examined using the Facial Action Coding System. In addition, speech components and heart rate reactivity during the Structured Interviews were examined. Among the facial behaviors assessed, two significantly differentiated Type As from Type Bs: Glare and Disgust. The Glare and Disgust facial scores correlated significantly with a number of speech components, most notably Hostility, which has been found to be associated with CHD incidence in other research. No differences between the two behavior types were found for heart rate reactivity. Implications of the findings for the understanding and assessment of coronary-prone behaviors such as hostility are discussed.

Approach-withdrawal and cerebral asymmetry: emotional expression and brain physiology. I.

In this experiment, we combined the measurement of observable facial behavior with simultaneous measures of brain electrical activity to assess patterns of hemispheric activation in different regions during the experience of happiness and disgust. Disgust was found to be associated with right-sided activation in the frontal and anterior temporal regions compared with the happy condition. Happiness was accompanied by left-sided activation in the anterior temporal region compared with disgust. No differences in asymmetry were found between emotions in the central and parietal regions. When data aggregated across positive films were compared to aggregate negative film data, no reliable differences in brain activity were found. These findings illustrate the utility of using facial behavior to verify the presence of emotion, are consistent with the notion of emotion-specific physiological patterning, and underscore the importance of anterior cerebral asymmetries for emotions associated with approach and withdrawal.

The Duchenne smile: emotional expression and brain physiology. II.

Facial expression, EEG, and self-report of subjective emotional experience were recorded while subjects individually watched both pleasant and unpleasant films. Smiling in which the muscle that orbits the eye is active in addition to the muscle that pulls the lip corners up (the Duchenne smile) was compared with other smiling in which the muscle orbiting the eye was not active. As predicted, the Duchenne smile was related to enjoyment in terms of occurring more often during the pleasant than the unpleasant films, in measures of cerebral asymmetry, and in relation to subjective reports of positive emotions, and other smiling was not.

Smiles when lying.

Subtle differences among forms of smiling distinguished when subjects were truthful and when they lied about experiencing pleasant feelings. Expressions that included muscular activity around the eyes in addition to the smiling lips occurred more often when people were actually enjoying themselves as compared with when enjoyment was feigned to conceal negative emotions. Smiles that included traces of muscular actions associated with disgust, fear, contempt, or sadness occurred more often when subjects were trying to mask negative emotions with a happy mask. When these differences among types of smiling were ignored and smiling was treated as a unitary phenomenon, there was no difference between truthful and deceptive behavior.

Universals and cultural differences in the judgments of facial expressions of emotion.

We present here new evidence of cross-cultural agreement in the judgement of facial expression. Subjects in 10 cultures performed a more complex judgment task than has been used in previous cross-cultural studies. Instead of limiting the subjects to selecting only one emotion term for each expression, this task allowed them to indicate that multiple emotions were evident and the intensity of each emotion. Agreement was very high across cultures about which emotion was the most intense. The 10 cultures also agreed about the second most intense emotion signaled by an expression and about the relative intensity among expressions of the same emotion. However, cultural differences were found in judgments of the absolute level of emotional intensity.

Imitation of facial movements in brain damaged patients.

The imitation of a large repertoire of upper and lower facial actions was requested from a group of left, right brain damaged and control subjects in order to explore: (1) if a left or right hemispheric focal lesion produces a similar pattern of impairment on this task; (2) if the impairment is associated with oral apraxia. The results show that left and right brain damaged patients score significantly lower than controls but the two pathologic groups do not differ from each other. The imitation of facial movements is not related in any way to oral apraxia and no specific localization of the lesion seems responsible for the impairment in this task. It is suggested that the control of facial movements might have a multiple representation in either hemisphere.

Is the startle reaction an emotion?

In this study, we examined startle reactions in which the subjects did and did not know when a blank pistol would be fired. In addition, we asked subjects to suppress their startle response and to simulate a startle when there was no gunshot. Detailed measurement of facial muscular actions supported most of the findings reported by Landis and Hunt (1939), but our findings suggested that startle be considered a reflex not an emotion. The findings are considered in terms of current disagreements about exactly what constitutes an emotion, including the argument between Zajonc (1980) and Lazarus (1984) about the role of appraisal.

Autonomic nervous system activity distinguishes among emotions.

Emotion-specific activity in the autonomic nervous system was generated by constructing facial prototypes of emotion muscle by muscle and by reliving past emotional experiences. The autonomic activity produced distinguished not only between positive and negative emotions, but also among negative emotions. This finding challenges emotion theories that have proposed autonomic activity to be undifferentiated or that have failed to address the implications of autonomic differentiation in emotion.

Pan-cultural elements in facial displays of emotion.

Observers in both literate and preliterate cultures chose the predicted emotion for photographs of the face, although agreement was higher in the literate samples. These findings suggest that the pan-cultural element in facial displays of emotion is the association between facial muscular movements and discrete primary emotions, although cultures may still differ in what evokes an emotion, in rules for controlling the display of emotion, and in behavioral consequences.