Do you ever wonder if someone is showing you their true emotions? Is he or she just a bit too happy or too angry to be believable? Scientists have done quite some research in the field of emotions, and one of the topics they have studies is the difference between real and acted emotions. Today I will discuss the research that me and my project group executed on this topic.
First of all, you need to know about the six universal emotions that were classified by Paul Ekman. These emotions are: happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust and anger. The facial expressions accompanying these emotions are displayed the same by all people in all cultures. Therefore, these emotions are easy to recognize and classify, and thus very suitable for using in emotion research.
Therefore, in the research concerning the difference between real and acted emotions, these universal emotions were used as well. It was discovered that observers perceive acted emotions as more intense than real emotions. What we wanted to find out was if this also holds true for emotions that do not fall within the six universal emotions. We decided to focus our research on the emotion “fright” / “shock”.
In order to obtain the stimulus for our experiment, we showed ten people a short movie clip which induced the shock reaction and videotaped this. Next, we asked these same people to act out a shock reaction and videotaped this as well. We compiled all these recordings into one tape, which would be used as the stimulus for our experiment. The actual experiment consisted of showing thirty people the stimulus tape. The participants were asked to rate the intensity of the emotion for each individual clip.
Through this experiment we found some great results. According to our data the acted emotions are experienced by the observers as more intense than the real emotions. This agrees nicely with previous research. We also found that women perceive both real and acted emotions as more intense than men do. This is probably because women are generally better in recognizing emotions than men are.
So, what can you take out of all this? Well, basically: If you are going to fake an emotion, don’t overdo it!
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