Being told someone looks ‘grumpy’ makes them seem even grumpier: Language is just as important as expressions when reading someone’s emotions, study shows
- Experts from Australia and the US asked volunteers to rank people’s emotions
- When emotions were labelled this altered how expressions were interpreted
- The effect was most pronounced with angry, sad or scared faces the team found
Language is as important as expressions when reading emotion, a study has found — meaning that being told someone looks ‘grumpy’ can makes them seem grumpier.
Researchers from Australia and the US asked volunteers to rate the emotions of people in either photographs or videos.
The team found that when the participants were told that the subjects were feeling a specific emotion, this biased how they interpreted the expressions on show.
The effect was most pronounced when dealing with angry, sad or scared faces — as opposed to happy, disgusted, embarrassed, proud or surprised — the team found.
Language is as important as expressions when reading emotion, a study has found — meaning that being told someone looks ‘grumpy’ can makes them seem grumpier (stock image)
‘The current studies demonstrate that language context alters the dimensional affective foundations that underlie our judgements of others’ expressions,’ the researchers wrote in their paper.
‘Emotions are not simply read from expressions,’ they added.
‘Rather, language may have the last word.’
In the first party of the study, psychologist Megan Barker and colleagues at the University of Queensland asked 172 participants to rate the expressions of 32 pictures of facial expressions — paired with one of 24 different ’emotion labels’.
For example, labels included such descriptions as ‘This person is feeling elated’ or ‘This person is feeling repulsed’.
The team found that the content of the emotion labels had a significant impact on how the participants felt the people in each image were feeling.
Researchers from Australia and the US found that this effect was particularly pronounced when dealing with angry, sad or scared faces. Pictured, Grumpy Cat — but was she, really?
In the second part of the study, the researchers repeated the experiment — however, this time, 104 volunteers were asked the rank the emotions of people seen in moving videos.
Just as with the static images, the team found that the labels on the images impacted how the participant judged the people’s emotional states.
The full findings of the study were published in the journal PLOS ONE.